White Malice

Paice Ashton Lord's sole album is a rather anonymous-sounding late-1970s hard rock/AOR effort. There's more funk, soul, boogie, and jazz influence than you would expect from Deep Purple alumni, but at heart these are typical period mainstream rock songs that don't lend a distinctive personality to the short-lived band. There's an outrageously blatant quote from Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel" in "Silas & Jerome." The 2001 CD reissue on Purple Records adds eight bonus tracks from the sessions for their unreleased second album, which are of a similar but less polished quality. Some of the songs are instrumentals rather than fully worked-up compositions, and the fidelity on a few of them is substandard, though not truly bad. The liner notes for the reissue give a thorough history of the band.

Steve Thorne is now one of progs leading composers, his direct honest and almost poetic delivery elevates him to a prog scholar, the musicianship as always is beyond reproach and only his very private persona has prevented him from being a household name in our genre.
While Thorne has sometimes been accompanied by a variety of artists from the prog scene in the past, this is no longer the case over the last few albums. No John Mitchell, Gary Chandler, Martin Orford or Tony Levin this time, but a more or less permanent backing band with drummer Kyle Fenton and guitarist Geoff Lea, although Big Big Train drummer Nick D’Virgilio (NdV) makes a guest appearance, as he did on the last album. But the apparent lack of star quality does not detract from the music: Thorne is a gifted songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and singer…