(EMI)
Herald rating: * * * *
Review: Graham Reid
Canada’s Tea Party unashamedly wore their influences on their leather pants: they were for Led Zep’s Indo-rock fusion and Jim Morrison’s dark baritone, swirling guitars and the occasional sitar and a whiff of incense.
Some people can pull off the retro-rock thing pretty well (Oasis in their early days, Karl Wallinger’s Beatlesque World Party) and with others it just looks silly (Lenny Kravitz).
Tea Party sat somewhere in between and over four albums tracked a creditable and credible progression into progrock-pop. In other words they became musically more ambitious (but equally derivative) yet kept the songs tight and memorable.
This 15-track collection also offers new material (the Doors-like Walking Wounded complete with Led Zep arabesques), two tracks left over from their last album sessions, and remixes of some better tracks.
The Tea Party might not have been your cup of tea, as it were. But as with that Lenny Kravitz pre-Christmas compilation, this is probably the only one you need.
<I>The Tea Party:</I> Tangents
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