BLIND RAVAGE – Blind Ravage
This Montreal, Quebec-based band produced just the one album, which came out in 1972. They were a hard rock band who dabbled in psychedelia, and whose album is highly prized for it guitar-work. It opens with a good cover of Dale Hawkins ‘Susie-Q’, but apart from that song all the others are originals. ‘Tousaw’ nicks the riff to ‘Day Tripper’ and uses it as the basis for a hard rocker, which is the first to showcase the guitar-work of Jean Charbonneau. ‘Friday Fish’ is a good chugging rock track, even if it is slightly lacking a tune, but ‘Prodigal’ is an improvement, with a memorably tuneful verse and catchy chorus. ‘My Life’ was written by drummer Andre Deguirre, and was also picked as the B-side to their sole single, and although it does contain some fine fuzz-guitar work it is another case of enthusiasm over melody. ‘Strange Power’ is taken at a slower pace, and is all the better for it, as it gives Charbonneau a chance to interject some chiming guitar into the song as well as giving organist Serge Fleury his first real chance to show what he can do. ‘Cement Jungle’ and ‘Ruins’ are back to the basic hard rock structure, and the best is saved for last, with ‘Disaster’ being more organ based, and therefore having a fuller sound, and ‘Loser’ having prominent piano and a good vocal performance. This latter song was the A-side of their single, and although not really representative of the album as a whole, was probably the best choice for a commercial release. I must admit that I don’t really see why this is so highly prized – it is a reasonably good hard rock album, although the production could have been a bit beefier, and oddly enough the band seem to give their best performance on the one track that they did not write. Still, there are not that many Canadian hard rock albums from the period and so this one would be one of the better examples.