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Reviews

Life Trip — Abobe Ride
((Not on label) no#, 1996, CD)

by Jeff Melton, Published 1997-05-01

Abobe Ride Cover art

Life Trip is Chip Simmond's brain child and musical excursion. He handles everything from soup to nuts: keyboards, drums, woodwinds, vocals, arrangements. He's fairly adept at playing several different styles of music, ranging from your average pedestrian blues rock (opening track "Free Thinker's Blues / Jam") to some extended jams ("Primitive Music," "Rocketfly") and even a few ballads. Lyrically the subject matter is pleasant but thin, underdeveloped and lightweight hippie prose. Deadheads will probably love it! For example, from the title track: "Gazing at wonders, within outside, The mind has died, myself to be unborn." Sorry, but even my old drug-dazed college poetry sizes up better than this. Overall I'd say this enthusiastic effort would be better suited to a full group rendering with a few other ideas mixed in. Programmed drums don't ever match up against metal cymbals and drum heads, and can be offensive after a few songs. Chip seems to do well in dabbling in everything with redundant ideas and in the end no master of any specific one. This promo tape I received at Prog Day is little better than rough demos that provide some inclination of what a real group could do with this limp set of material. Adobe Ride could be compared reasonably to some of the flower-power Haight-Ashbury projects, but that may be pushing it too far.

Filed under: New releases, Issue 12, 1996 releases

Related artist(s): Life Trip

 

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