Dion The Road I'm On: A Retrospective (1997)

If the heady days of soulful blues soaked 60’s and 70’s rock ignite your heart and the likes of Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, and Free send your emotions and pulse rate soaring then a new and equally impactful treat is just waiting for your adoration. The Brimstone Days is a band from Malmö, Sweden, a trio who live and breathe those inspirational days whilst their creativity sows those old seeds within its own unique imagination to bloom impressive and powerful songs as within their new album On A Monday Too Early To Tell…

You don’t make a 22-track album without experiencing doubts—even when you’re Britain’s biggest band. “We kept laughing to ourselves,” The 1975’s Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “‘Can we really put out a record like this? Can we really be where we are?’ The success of [2018 album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships] didn’t change us, but it certainly made us think, ‘God, this is a lot of responsibility. To be compared to Radiohead. F**king hell. What are we going to do?’”They way they saw it, there were two options. The first was to play to expectation and try to become even bigger. The second—the path they chose—was to return to when they were smallest.

This is a grand, satisfying performance on almost every count. Its stature allows me for the moment to put aside the baggage of all earlier recordings and assess it on its own merits alone. In the first place, following on his successful Rheingold (Decca, 11/95), Dohnanyi conducts a well-paced, thought-through reading that at once creates dramatic excitement and attends to the longer view. From the opening storm right through to the Magic Fire Music there’s a welcome sense of forward movement everywhere, except in the middle of Act 2 where in places Dohnanyi slows down inordinately, allowing the score to become momentarily becalmed.