FunkFreak75 Seasoned trumpeter Ian Carr had had his fill with co-leading a band and so branched out with his new band Nucleus. In 1970 the UK label Vertigo released the new band's debut album, Elastic Rock, to much acclaim and popular fervor. Next came an album from the same lineup, Songs Without Words, on which guitarist Chris Spedding received top billing. In 1971 Let's Talk About It Later album was released.

1. "Song For The Bearded Lady" (7:25) upbeat, hard-drivin, great musical weave, great use of horns. At two minutes in the sound calms down to support Ian Carr's soloing. He sounds so much like American jazz great Freddie Hubbard it's uncanny! Background instrumentalists start getting a little frisky in the fourth minute (awesome!) but then Chris Spedding takes a turn in the lead as Karl Jenkins toys with him on the Hohner Electra piano in the opposite channel. in the fifth. Nice contrasting styles. Everybody remerges together for the final minute--an outro to bookend the intro. (14.5/15)

2. "Sun Child" (5:19) opens with some saucy, spacious bass, drums and guitar over which a soprano sax teases seductively. The interplay intensifies insidiously over the first couple minutes until it feels as if each instrument is kind of in their own world. The arrival of Ian's trumpet kind of soothes and shifts the direction and intensity of the collective, creating more space but less "competitiveness." (8.75/10)

3. "Lullaby For A Lonely Child" (4:21) opens with delicate bass, cymbal and electric piano interplay before controlled yet emotional trumpet takes the lead. Support is joined by gently picked guitar and saxes before a little whole-group chorus spaces out the next section of trumpet and bouzouki solos. Intensifies slightly for the second chorus but then bouzouki takes us to the end. Pleasant but nothing to write home about. (8.25/10)

4. "We'll Talk About It Later" (6:19) opens with some raunchier guitar sound accompanied by subdued bass, hi-hat, and Hohner. Accompanying instruments shift into second gear as the song becomes fully blues. Guitars, Hohner, and drums all shift into third and fourth gears as bass and muted trumpet remain rock steady until the second half of the third minute when trumpet takes on a more prominent roll. Has a very DOORS-like quality and sound. Chris Spedding's free-wailing guitar really stands out on this one. (8.5/10)

5. "Oasis" (9:49) opens as if all instrumentalists are in their own world, expressing their own moods, until around 1:50 the keys' chord selection become steady, guitar strums, bass line and cymbal play support this. Horns too, before trumpet goes off on a solo. Guitars, drums and keys start amping up their inputs as Ian continues to solo into the fifth minute. At the end of the fifth minute, Ian goes a little freestyle but then everybody else softens and backs down, making room for a prominent muted soprano sax solo in the sixth, seventh and eighth minutes. Drums begin to go rogue in the seventh and eighth before a calm appears in which Brian Smith continues playing his sax as Chris Spedding and Jeff Clyne's bass take more foreground prominence. Horn section enters to bring everybody together just before the end. (18/20)

6. "Ballad of Joe Pimp" (3:48) Vocals! Sounds like it could come off of an early SOFT MACHINE album. Horns take over after the first verse. A very Philly R&B/Soul feel to this one. (8.5/10)

7. "Easter 1916" (8:47) Sounds like a classic experimental late 1960s experimental jazz fusion song as BRAINTICKET-like vocals and keys are driven along by blues-rock bass, guitar and drums play. Its a great groove, despite it's odd meter. Melodic jazz sax solo in the third and fourth minutes becomes more free form in the fifth and sixth. Support instrumentation disappear in the seventh minute as drums solo while sax continues it's spitting and spouting. Awesome drum play! Ends with a familiar "Love Supreme" sound and drum solo. (19/20)

Total Time: 45:48

Over all I'd call this an exceptionally good collection of experimental jazz-rock fusion songs with the artists all sounding like they are coming from the jazz world trying to cross over into rock. Though not all of it stands up as being "fresh" since so much J-R Fusion has come since this album's 1971 release, most times it works very well. Definitely a wonderful accomplishment for it's time.

A-/five stars; a minor masterpiece of progressive rock music from the early era of jazz-rock fusion experimentation. Though Ian Carr would continue to use the Nucleus name for almost two decades, from here out it was well understood that this was his band and they were to play music his way: thus the consistently (almost absurdly) high turnover rate among band membership. In fact, three of Ian's major finds would soon become fairly steady members and compositional contributors to another of England's new Jazz-Rock Fusion bands: drummer John Marshall, multi-instrumentalist Karl Jenkins, and John Babbington will settle for some time with Mike Ratledge's The Soft Machine.

Warthur Though I think the last two compositions on the album are rather spoiled by the inclusion of vocals, We'll Talk About It Later is still a very confident and capable follow-up to Elastic Rock, with Nucleus continuing to practice their own distinctive style of fusion. Debate over whether or not they had any influence in their early material from In a Silent Way or Bitch's Brew aside, by this point they're very much ploughing their own furrow, developing a style of jazz-rock which would end up having a glancing influence on late-phase Canterbury bands such as Matching Mole, Hatfield and the North, National Health and, of course, the later Soft Machine albums.

Sean Trane The apex of British jazz-rock fusion so hot, that your speakers will simply melt and your brains will have fried much before that. Un-mistakably the best album of Nucleus but also in the top 5 of all fusion albums including Miles, Mahavishnu etc.... If Elastic Rock (their debut) had given the tone both musically but pictorially also with the incredible Roger Dean cut-out cover of magma/lava about to burst out in the open, it is clear that this album betters it by not one notch but three.

"We'll talk about it later" is somehow not the best title for this album as this is a definitive statement if fusion. The sleeve artwork is again a Roger Dean gatefold cut-out work but not as impressive as the debut but the centre photos is about the Irish uprising in 1916, a recurrent theme in early Nucleus albums (four tracks over the first three albums). The power exudes from every one of these tracks and Bearded Lady , Sun Child , Oasis are incredibly hardcore but nowhere is this so evident than on the title track. In this track , Karl Jenkins saturates his organ to a level that even Banton, Lord, Emerson, Ratledge, Sinclair could not even imagine possible, but Chris Spedding comes in (like he does on the whole album ) with a brilliant guitar, subdued, awesomely restrained, powerful, fearful. In a word: Flabbergastingly breathless performance. The horn players can simply only sublimely accompany the Jenkins-Spedding duo , with John Marshall providing dantesque drumming, Clyne - although trying to add something simply gets drowned out in such a mass of molten and fused lava flowing from your speakers directly into your brains: orgasmic , orgiastic , stupendous!!!!!!!!!!

Side 2 is rather a different as it contains three tracks but Ballad Of Joe Pimp , while revisiting the title track is clearly under its own life with Carr and Smith blowing their horns as if their lives depended on it and the records closes on a Nucleus rarity: A sung track. Easter 1916 is the third time in two albums they revisit the Irish upheaval of the times and that will eventually lead to the Irish independence (well partially anyways as Ulster is still not freed). The lyrics are astounding somehow halfway sung halfway declaimed (almost as if to be disclaimed).

Very poignant end to a superb record, one of my top 5 of all time! Breathlessly beautiful and astoundingly flabbergasting ................words fail me...........Goose bumps and spine chills guaranteed. A must!!! No life can be complete before you heard this at ear-splitting level.