WAR — War Featuring Eric Burdon : Love Is All Around (review)

WAR — War Featuring Eric Burdon : Love Is All Around album cover Album · 1976 · RnB Buy this album from MMA partners
2.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
This album is a posthumous Burdon-era album, where manager Goldstein grabs all the leftover tracks from the short but fruitful Burdon-War partnership. Released in November 76, when War’s better days were past them, Love Is All around is a shameless attempt at exploitation and making a quick buck. Not that it attempts to hide it at all, but the album is not bad in itself, taking unused material from their heydays. With a newspaper artwork ala TAAB, the album deserves a listen if you’re into the classic War stuff.

Starting with the unremarkable title track, the album plunges into a shorter version of Tobacco Road, or at least they edited the lengthy jam parts. I personally prefer this version to the one in Black Man’s Burdon. Under the “Burdon reign”, War could’ve passed for a blues group given their frontman’s gift for blues. Here we are treated to another lengthy blues, but not one of their better one. With its 11 minutes, Home Dreams is a fine blues but overstays its welcome by a good 5 minutes, because some of those solos, breaks and jams are a tad foreseeable. Just two tracks on the flipside, including a cover of The Beatles’ Day In The Life, slowed down as if Vanilla Fudge was having a go at it, but here War is missing the notch by a mile…. Brain Auger And Trinity’s version is much better despite being instrumental. It’s not really a massacre, but I understand that some would hate it, even if it has its moments. And just to avoid taking sides, the other track is a live medley over the Stones’ Paint It Black with even more latitude, but the Stones’ track can take more abuse than its Fab Four counterpart, for obvious reasons. Note that this is another version than that one on Black Man’s Burdon album.

Hardly essential, but still definitely worth the odd spin here & there, this posthumous release is mainly an exploitation album, but then again, if all of those were of this calibre, we’d have to change its designation. For fans only, but it does deserve a bit more than that.

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