Journey cover

Journey

Released

In a blindfold test, you would swear that Journey, the third album by Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come, was a lost early eighties post-punk masterpiece, such is its predictive qualities. It’s not so much the way it engages with technology and electronics in a manner that’s rudimentary but experimental, though it was the first album recorded entirely with a drum machine as the core of the ‘rhythm section’. It’s also there in the way Brown and co. build the arrangements and melodies – they’re not threadbare, but at times they embrace a starchy minimalism that’s curiously appealing (e.g. the opening few minutes of “Time Captives”). But it’s the interplanetary curiosity of the Journey – stretches of bubbling, air-popping synth noise, bossa nova rhythms suspended in empty space, riffs like prog in miniature, Brown’s heroic vocal delivery, guitars that gnash and gnarl in the corners – that makes it both so compelling, and so unexpected. 1973 felt like the future here.

Jon Dale

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