Love Live Life + 1 - Love Will Make a Better You (Japan Progressive Rock 1971)

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Japan 24-Bit Remaster

A wild mix of free jazz and fuzzy rock -- played by a groundbreaking Japanese group who mix flute and saxes with heavy Hammond and plenty of guitar! The album begins with the side-long "Question Mark" -- a tune that breaches a really metaphysical question at the start, then really trips out with some free-jamming instrumentation. Other numbers are a bit more straight -- and almost show a soul jazz influence at times -- and the accented English language vocals almost make the set come off like some of those European post-beat sides that were a jamming mix of funk, soul, and rock.

Number six on the Japrocksampler Top 50, available again for the first time in over a decade! "Commencing with singer Akira Fuse's goggle-eyed one-day-old-baby innocence, Love Live Life + 1's album opener 'The Question Mark' escorts us through an eighteen-minute free-rock R&B adventure like nothing before or since. Clanking harsher than even the title track of Funkadelic's Free Your Mind & Your Ass Will Follow, and twice as long; cosmic as the Cosmic Joker's Galactic Supermarket, and gnarly as John McLaughlin's out-there-a-minute axe excursions on Miles's 'Right Off'' or his own Devotion solo LP, do these guys fight for their right to party! The mellower second side includes the insanely brilliant eight-minute epic 'Shadows Of My Mind', in which Akira Fuse sings like some drunken Italian baritone, while atonal swooping strings and crazy brass support/undermine him; then it's off into a juggernaut bass-heavy clatter-thon with duel-axe outrage of the highest level. And how about that title track whose catchy bastard licks unashamedly rip Sly's 'I Want To Take You Higher', but still have you singing along with Fuse? The record closes brilliantly with the demented 'Facts About It All', which opens like Fuse laying a grunting 6/8 James Brown/Eric Burdon ballad on us. 

But no, this miniature R&B opera says in 2 minutes and 56 seconds what prog bands took a whole side to say. All hail visionary genius Ikuzo Orita for uniting his fave guitarist Kimio Mizutani with the errant free-jazz Gibson 335 of Takao Naoi, whose brittle spittle pops permanent wheelies around these slippery rhythm tracks. Also hail Orita for recognizing the genius of these songs of sax player Kei Ichihara, for trusting Akira Fuse's professionalism and open-mindedness, and for seeing this 33-minute-long classic to its unlikely conclusion." 

01. The Question Mark   17:57 
02. Runnin' Free   3:40 
03. Love Will Make a Better You   4:23 
04. Shadow of the Mind   8:41 
05. Facts About It All   2:54 

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