It’s all meat. All of it.
You can look at covers, and you can research the band, the style, pretty much everything… but call your band It’s All Meat (coined from a dog-food commercial) and nothing else matters—you have my attention. And to be fair to the band’s one-and-done album, It’s All Meat (so juicy they used it for the album name, too), there’s some real fun to be had with Canada’s brief answer to the swagger of the Stones and other bands making waves in the U.K. and U.S. Nothing to stir up cries of “THEY WERE ROBBED!” or anything like that, but when the guitars get loud and psychedelic, I’m able to find my happy place.
I’m not sure I would have opened with “You Don’t Notice the Time You Waste”; it comes about four years too late, laden with jangly pop Jagger and Co. had already abandoned. Next, “Make Some Use of Your Friends” (It’s All Meat sure have a lot of mandates) goes with a boogie groove, but this is where things start to twist. The solo comes in blazing, and then the song shifts to a minor key and turns downright sinister as the solos return, with more Iommi than Richards in the mix.
That sinister tone is courtesy of guitarist Wayne Roworth, and whenever he’s highlighted, It’s All Meat soars. The epics of the album, each at nine minutes, go more psych than prog, with “Crying Into the Deep Lake” hitting some serious Doors territory. The closing track, “Sunday Love,” falters, giving you little to bite into until its culminating rush in the final two minutes.
But in between are enough fun tracks (I like how the organ solemnity of “Roll My Own” suddenly bursts into some Grand Funk-style rock) to highlight that there was in fact a psychedelic rock scene in the Great White North and, had we perhaps nurtured it on this side of the border a little more, we’d be talking about more bands than Rush, Triumph, and… uh, you see the issue here?
Gotta love Canada. I may have to cover some Max Webster next.
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