Blues Creation — Blues Creation (1969)

2016-09-11T09:06:58Z

Blues Creation — Blues Creation (1969)


01. Checkin’ Up On My Baby — 4:53
02. Steppin’ Out — 2:52
03. Smoke Stack Lightnin’ — 5:31
04. Double Crossing Time — 7:03
05. I Can’t Keep From Crying — 4:37
06. Spoonful — 8:13
07. Rollin’ And Tumblin’ — 4:03
08. All Your Love — 4:34

Kazuo Takeda — lead guitar, vocals, harmonica
Fumio Fuya — vocals
Yoshiyuki Noji — bass
Shinichi Tashiro — drums

Even by the flash-in-the-pan standards of Japan's turbulent late-‘60s/early-70s post-Group Sounds psychedelic rock scene, Blues Creation seemed to come out of nowhere and head right back there again faster than most anyone else. Like many of its contemporaries, Blues Creation was launched by a budding Japanese guitar hero whose mind had been effectively blown by the deafeningly heavy sounds of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath -- this being Kazuo Takeda, who had actually already spent some time playing in Europe and America, and was therefore a first-hand witness to the sonic events that spawned heavy metal's birth. But before going down that road, Takeda and his chosen Blues Creation bandmates, Fumio Nunoya (vocals), Takayuki Noji (bass), and Shinichi Tashiro (drums), recorded an eponymous 1969 debut filled with heavy-handed blues covers (a strategy copied by Flower Travellin' Band just one year later), as befit their chosen moniker. But Takeda would soon have his stylistic rethink and scrap everything for a new lineup consisting of Hiromi Osawa (vocals), Masashi Saeki (bass), and Akiyuki Higuchi (drums), returning in 1971 with Blues Creation's most legendary artifact, the cryptically named sophomore LP, Demon & Eleven Children, which was awash in primal, proto-metallic acid rock. The album would only achieve legendary status decades later, though, and so the rest of that year found a multi-tasking Blues Creation recording another album backing singer Carmen Maki (billed as Carmen Maki & Blues Creation), as well as a jam-happy concert document entitled simply Blues Creation Live. And then there was…silence; and by the very next year Takeda had decided to break up the band and move back to London, where he befriended American hard rockers Mountain (among others), and duly returned to Japan for a tour with them in 1975. Now leading a new power trio billed only as Creation, he recorded several albums well into the early '80s, including 1975's Creation, 1976's Felix Pappalardi & Creation (recorded with the man himself in Nantucket), 1977's Pure Electric Soul, 1978's Super Rock in the Highest Voltage, 1981's Lonely Heart, and 1982's Rock City. In the aftermath, Takeda continued to perform live, work sessions as a musician and producer, and released more than 20 solo albums, but it's arguably still Blues Creation's brief but volcanic existence that headlines his impressive CV. --- Eduardo Rivadavia, Rovi

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Blues Creation — Demon & Eleven Children (1971)

2016-09-08T15:30:15Z

Blues Creation — Demon & Eleven Children (1971)


01. Atomic Bombs Away — 5:29
02. Mississippi Mountain Blues — 4:05
03. Just I Was Born — 6:16
04. Sorrow — 7:28
05. One Summer Day — 2:23
06. Brain Buster — 2:01
07. Sooner Or Later — 5:12
08. Demon & Eleven Children — 9:16

Hiromi Ohsawa — vocals
Kazuo Takeda — guitar, vocals
Masashi Saeki — bass
Masayuki Higuchi — drums

Blues Creation MKII (essentially founding guitarist Kazuo Takeda and three fresh-faced handpicked cohorts) made their recorded debut via 1971's enigmatically named Demon & Eleven Children, which was released in 1971 amidst an onslaught of then unsuccessful but now legendary albums documenting Japan's eccentric music scene of the period. Yet, ironically, Blues Creation's very competence at replicating the Brit blues boom's proto-metal aftermath wound up rendering this, the group's signature effort, both less exotic than, say, the Flower Travellin' Band's Satori, and certainly less radical than Speed, Glue & Shinki's garage-raw classic Eve -- to cite but two of that generation's most notorious sonic landmarks. In every other respect, though, Demon & Eleven Children is a formidable document of its ilk by any measure -- Japanese or global -- as it harnessed Takeda's previous international experience and recent Black Sabbath fascination into a monumentally wasted musical death-in. There, among the album's awesomely grinding, groaning dinosaur stomps one finds the acid-trip apocalypse of "Atomic Bombs Away," the incendiary full-band catharsis of "Just I Was Born," and the endless sequence of Godzilla-esque power chords and elephantine feedback of the epic title track. However, nestled among these, there is also the relative variety provided by token blues-rocker "Mississippi Mountain Blues" (clearly inspired by Flower Travellin' Band's own "Louisiana Blues," released the previous year), the extended jazz and blues improvisations of the mostly mellower "Sorrow" (something of a bridge between Sabbath and Budgie!), and the lysergic dreamscape of "One Summer Day." Still, there's no doubt that Blues Creation's existence and appeal relied almost entirely on Takeda, who further flexes his muscles (or fingers, as it were) across the energetic "Sooner or Later" and his personal showcase "Brane Baster," overall coming off like a more technically gifted Tony Iommi (even though he admittedly copped many of the man's riffs and licks). In short, it's safe to assume that only geographical isolation stopped Demon & Eleven Children from turning Blues Creation into a major concern overseas on par with, if not Zeppelin, Purple, or Sabbath, then possibly Leaf Hound, Buffalo, or Cactus. ---Eduardo Rivadavia, Rovi

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