Search - Strawbs :: Deja Fou

New Work from Classic Band

KenProspero | Connecticut | 09/01/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Deja Fou is the first album of all new material by Strawbs in a decade, and it's nice to see that the boys haven't lost their edge.



Fans of Stawbs will undoubtedly know that the band had undergone many personnel changes over the years. Deja Fou sees a reunion of the 1974-75 line up that recorded "Hero and Heroine" and "Ghosts". This is also the line-up that recently toured the US and Canada.



The album itself is a combination of style with some several songs being largely acoustic, and other songs more electric and rocking. Overall, the album works well. However, the album lacks the characteristically strong keyboard work that Strawbs were known for. (Hawken doesn't appear on several of the acoustic tracks, and on the others, I found the keyboard work more subdued than what we've heard in the past from this band.).



While many "classic" bands are content with rehashing past successes, this has never been the case with Strawbs. Stylistically, the album represents a definate development of David Cousins' and Strawbs' style. Several songs paint a picture and create a mood with music and lyrics and are amongst their strongest pieces. Other songs songs are in the style that fans have seen in the recent Acosutic album ("Baroque and Roll") as well as David Cousins' recent collaberation with Rick Wakeman ("Hummingbird")



The first two tracks on the album, Riviera Del Flori (Cousins/Lambert) and Under A Cloudless Sky (Cousins) are classic Strawbs Prog music. They are really one work (a la 'Remembering/That Was You and I (When we were Young) from Ghosts). The song has a feel that makes one feel as if one were floating through the sky on an afternoon. Similarly, Sunday Morning (Cousins/Lambert) also has this dreamy quality, and painting a perfect picture with the words and music giving you a feel of a lazy Sunday Morning. A third song where the music and words paint a picture is this Barren Land (Cousins/Lambert), which starts out acoustically, then builds to a crescendo powerfully punctuating the point of the song. This song has a lot of power, and after listening to the album a few times is my personal favorite song on the album.



Face Down in the Well is a David Cousins composition that the Acoustic Strawbs have been playing in concert for the last year. This version adds some strings, and fills out the melody, this track is the kind of ballad that we've come to expect from David Cousins. On a Night Like This (also played by the Acoustic band in concert, written by David Cousins) is a jaunty tune with a latin beat and reminiscent of La Bamba in the beginning -- (who'd have thought it!!). If there's a single from the album, this may be it. On listining to this and others, I detect a spanish/latin influence on Cousin's songwriting that was not present in his earlier work.



If and Here Today Gone Tomorrow (both Cousins) are further acoustic numbers. Both are romantic ballads.



Cold Steel, a David Lambert song takes the album in a different direction -- this a Rock song, pure and simple -- if the band had more popularity, I could see this song receiving a lot of air play. Apart from This Barren Land, it's my second favorite song on the album. When the Lights Came On, is a second David Lambert song, which starts acoustically (with a riff that seems to be inspired by Stairway to Heaven), building throughout.



Russian Front, credited to Cousins, Lambert, Cronk and Hawken, gives each member of the band the opportunity to show their musical prowess, as accompanied by bittersweet lyrics telling a story of life in communist Russia.



The final song NRG, is a melange of middle eastern sounding music, chanting lyrics and recorded street noises. In many ways this song is the most provocative on the album, marking a complete divergance from any Strawbs song that comes to memory. I suspect many die-hard fans will consider this song to be the worst on the album. I confess, I can't get the music out of my head, which I suppose says something.



Overall, Deja Fou is a strong album, with enough familiar for Strawbs fans to be able to welcome back old friends. However, the album also shows the evolution in style and innovation necessary to make it a consistently interesting.

"

Best Comeback of 2004

Kurt Harding | Boerne TX | 12/16/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I was never a huge Strawbs fan when they were in their heyday but I did buy a few of their albums and saw them in concert a couple of times. My favorite album of theirs from back then was and is Hero and Heroine. I have a couple of LPs still, but hadn't really thought about the band in years until one of the regulars on the Procol Harum chatroom "The Beanstalk" mentioned seeing them in Los Angeles recently touring a new album. Comments on the show and new songs were very positive so I jumped on amazon and ordered it immediately.

Man, its almost like 30 years have never gone by! Dave Cousins sounds almost exactly as he did in his prime and the quality of the songs on Deja Fou show that his muse is still strong. As a lyricist, Cousins is certainly in a league with Al Stewart, Nick Cave, and Keith Reid and as a musician, his melodies share the sophisticated world-wisdom of Stewart, the fathomless melancholy of Cave, and the introspective soul of Gary Brooker. If Deja Fou is not the best CD of 2004, its easily the year's best comeback effort.

The opening instrumental segues into a gorgeous Al Stewart-like ballad with Under A Cloudless Sky. That is followed by what I consider to be the CD's masterwork, as Cousins and company plumb the depths of despair on Face Down In The Well. But Cousins, like Cave, is also a masterful romantic writer as shown by On A Night Like This and If. Cold Steel is more uptempo with a vaguely Latin feel to it and is in my opinion the second best song here.

I actually like all of the album with the exception of the final cut N R G. On the rest of the CD, the band offers a variety of moods. The best of the rest are Sunday Morning, the pointedly anti-communist rocker Russian Front, and another great piece of sad-rock poetry with Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.

In my opinion, Deja Fou stands up there with the best of anything else the Strawbs have done. Its been a couple of years since an album of this magnitude has come from a band thought by many to have peaked long ago. So, if you were EVER a Strawbs fan, you owe it to yourself and your music loving friends to add this to your collection and to listen with an open mind. You'll be ever glad you did!"

Progressive British folk rock purists

K. A. Levine | Stow, MA, USA | 07/22/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Of course, the term purist is an oxymoron in the mix of genres that the Strawbs have been plying for more than 35 years and that the Hero and Heroine/Ghosts lineup here re-united helped to shape in the 1973-1975 period. The cover art is misleading, suggestive of the flower power era that Dave Cousins so dissed in the 1974 epic "Round and Round". This is a modern yet timeless album of fine songs, some treading new ground for the band, like the gutsy "Cold Steel" with its solid banjo, mandolin and punchy Dave Lambert vocals, or the Arabic and east Indian "NRG". Other songs harken back to the very early days, in particular "Sunday Morning". The gothic "Face Down in the Well" and the gorgeous ballad "If" both reflect the lessons learned from Dave Cousins' unplugged years with Brian Willoughby and the Acoustic Strawbs "Baroque and Roll" in both their starkness and their tasteful string arrangements. The progressive era is represented by the moodiness of the sublime "Under a Cloudless Sky" and the rollicking "Russian Front" with their acoustic guitars, multilayered vocals, and keyboard flourishes. Even the Nomadness/Deep Cuts/Burning for you period is referenced in "When the Lights came on" and "Here Today Gone Tomorrow", or the latin inflected rocker "On a Night Like This", that might be a hit in a just world. At times Dave Cousins' voice shows its wear, especially trying to hit notes that are a tad too low, as in "This Barren Land", and it would have been nice to have Lambert share lead vocal duties on one song, perhaps on the louder parts of "Under a Cloudless Sky", when we think of the power of such duets in "The Promised Land" or "Ghosts". In addition, for a Strawbs album it seems somewhat underproduced, which works to good effect as often as not, and the geographic separation of group members, in particular John Hawken, makes it feel like less of a group effort than might have been desired. These shortcomings are more than compensated by the return of Dave Cousins as a master songwriter and wordsmith, with his best work in this regard since the early 70s, and the reaffirmation of the band as inimitable purveyors and visionaries of a style that is here today and will be here tomorrow. In fact, there is no one else in sight."