Earth Band

Opening with Mike Hugg's title track, which builds on Mick Rogers' intense riffing and the killer vocals of Vicki Brown, Judith Powell, Liza Strike, and Ruby James, Messin' is pretty intense and involving from its very first bars. It's also damned topical and serious, for all of the free-wheeling rock & roll spirits and the progressive rock complexities that go into the playing. And the result is a spellbinding whole, featuring some astonishing keyboard flourishes by Manfred Mann himself (who ventures into Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson territory on "Buddah," even as the rest of the band seems to be emulating Deep Purple) and killer guitar from Mick Rogers, while Colin Pattenden and Chris Slade lay down the rhythm section like a pair of articulate pile-drivers…

Fans of muscular progressive rock will love Solar Fire, a concept album loosely designed around cosmology. The album opens with the majestic "Father of Night, Father of Day," which has the drive and complexity of a prime King Crimson track…

1986's Criminal Tango is one of the more intriguing titles in Manfred Mann's Earth Band extensive catalog. Not only is it filled with some of the more memorable cover versions in their four decade career, Criminal Tango is truly a rocking session that keeps their musical tradition alive…

Opening with Mike Hugg's title track, which builds on Mick Rogers' intense riffing and the killer vocals of Vicki Brown, Judith Powell, Liza Strike, and Ruby James, Messin' is pretty intense and involving from its very first bars…

Another piece of topical hard rock from Manfred Mann's Earth Band and, as before, listenable even to those without a serious bone in their bodies, by virtue of the playing. Moving between hard rock and British blues influences (with a special debt to Cream on the opening cut, "Give Me the Good Earth") and progressive rock, the quartet cuts a mean swathe across the sonic landscape, between Mick Rogers' soaring guitar solos and Manfred Mann's inimitable synthesizer work. Some of the less ambitious cuts, such as "I'll Be Gone," are relatively dispensable, but when these guys start reaching, as on "Earth Hymn," that's when their best musical instincts take hold, and the results are always worth hearing.

Remakes can be atrocious wastes of wax: subpar carbon copy re-treads dressed up as calculated idolatry, or deconstructionist reconfigurations basking in the laziness of lyrics already written. However, two of the greatest rewrites in history belong to Manfred Mann's Earth Band. The treatments of Bruce Springsteen's "Blinded By the Light" and "For You" included here create a wholly unique variation on the stark, earthy originals by flipping the tracks and exposing the soft, white underbelly, then piling on excessive musical ornamentation like a master filmmaker visualizing a novel, blowing the inspiration at the nucleus into a bowdlerized paronomasia of sonic perfection.

After a very successful period in the 60's with the pop group named after him and a much less successful intermezzo in Jazz with Chapter Three, the South-African born keyboardist Manfred Mann turned towards Rock music. In 1971 he formed Manf

In 1992, Manfred Mann's Earth Band in its latest incarnation delivered a new album that retraced a few earlier steps and got closer to finishing some ideas that earlier incarnations of the band had begun. The result was Masque, a strange and beautiful (and strangely beautiful) mix of jazz, rock, classical, and pop sounds, drawing on compositions from Paul Weller to Gustav Holst…