07. Stray Suicide 1971 (Transatlantic)
Hard Rock
A complex tight beast of an album!
Overview
Stray were destined to flirt with success which sadly never came, their debut album
Stray at number nine on my 1971 list was a rich and diverse effort with its eclectic styles, but it failed to make any commercial impact. The dual writing and singing team of Del Bromham and Steven Gadd were a highly talented pair that could easily rival in ability Andy Powell and Ted Turner of Wishbone Ash and believe me that is saying something! Wishbone Ash in many ways, were the band that they were most similar to with the dual guitar attack, heavy jamming, harmonious leads, similar sounding vocalists and general feel. At this time Stray probably had the option of going down a more commercial avenue and putting out something that would accommodate the possibility of commercial success, or stick to their guns and go with their own eclectic style. The band decided on the latter option and went into the studio to record more of the same for their second album
Suicide. Essentially it would be the same in concept and feel as the debut album, with the only real differences being the album’s negative title and the much heavier keyboard presence and darker feel to some of the songs. It’s obvious that the band had dark influences prior to recording, probably from the likes of Black Sabbath and Sir Lord Baltimore here, they then combined this with the roots rock presence that the band liked so much. The album was recorded in London in less than thirty hours studio time and is regarded as having a better production overall than the debut, which had a slightly rawer feel than the
Suicide album. Finally I never mentioned this on the previous Stray post, but what was amazing were the ages of the band members on these first two albums and that was an average age of just 18-20 years of age! Based on the quality of music they were putting out, I think that’s amazing.
Del Bromham- Guitar/Keyboards/Vocals
Steve Gadd- Guitar/Vocals
Gary Giles- Bass
Ritchie Cole- Drums
Production- Hugh Murphy
Album
Son of the Father- A song about men going off to war and the song starts off as a slow lament, before kicking into its up-tempo verse/chorus section, which contains some truly memorable sections, before again transforming itself into a funeral type procession dirge. The song contains some really crunching metal guitar and is very much a prog song.
Nature’s Way- Straight-up fuzzy sounding hard rocker.
Where Do Our Children Belong- Slow and lazily paced with some nice harmonies, as far as I’m concerned Stray did this type of thing very well, others may not enjoy it.
Jericho- An almost rampant sounding rocker, with its chiselled guitars and urgent sounding lyrics, has some really heavy sections and also a really dramatic descending guitar riff section, one of the most dynamic tracks the band ever put out.
Run Mister Run- Southern rock influenced and highlighted by its big thumping bass and drums, also has a great heavy jamming section in the middle to later part of the song.
Dearest Eloise- A Beatlesque sounding ballad and a snippet at just 2 minutes!
Do You Miss Me- A great song with its heavy American jazzy feel and frantic pace, almost matching the frantic pace at times of say a band like Ten Years After. Once again the band give out another lesson in how to do intense jamming.
Suicide- The title track is a hard rocker with a truly Black Sabbath feel or even a future Blue Oyster Cult effort, it’s dark, sombre and has those horror flick vocals, it must’ve inspired a whole load of future extreme metal vocalists on listening to this. But the real highlight of the song is that middle to late section highlighted by its heavy jamming section where all the components of the band are in complete unison.
Verdict
Suicide is a multi-faceted album and it sits as a perfect pair with the debut album, as two highly accomplished eclectic efforts. The album contains numerous classic Del Bromham licks and the pulsating bass of Gary Giles, which at times is reminiscent of Geezer Butler. Few bands at the time were capable of fusing so many styles as well as Stray. Throughout the album the listener can hear hard rock, heavy metal, lazy easy listening rock, ballads, southern rock and jazz-fusion. The band seemed to do justice to any style they took a fancy to (rather like the Beatles) and not always an easy thing to do. Bearing all this in mind, I really think the band’s eclectic hard rock feel along with peaking too early in their career, may have been their undoing concerning a commercial breakthrough with their first two albums. This was a factor which would resign the band as stalwart support and an opening act for other bands, often these bands didn’t get anywhere near the natural talent of Stray, but rock 'n' roll is littered with such stories! The lack of success with the
Suicide album, would finally push the band into more experimental territory for their third album
Saturday Morning Pictures, where like Lucifer’s Friend before them, they would try to steer into a more proggy direction and the hope of achieving more commercial success. It often seemed that progressive bands could usually embrace hard rock far better than hard rock bands could actually embrace progressive rock, just an observation of mine and not necessarily fact. Future Stray releases would see greater keyboard and synthesizer tinkering compared to their earlier efforts. And as they say, it would be tits up for the band throughout the rest of the decade, as the band really steered themselves into some really questionably bad musical directions. The band remain as one the great British bands of their generation, that sadly didn’t get the plaudits that their talent deserved.