Uriah Heep – Look At Yourself

3,049

5 Stars

*The cover is great; it’s a mirror, look at yourself! Get it?*

Audio CD (paid link)

Uriah Heep was formed in 1969 by taking the four members of the band Spice – David Byron on lead vocals, Paul Newton on bass, Alex Napier on drums, and Mick Box on lead guitar, and adding Ken Hensley on keyboards to add an extra dimension to the instrumentation and the writing skills of the band. Ken Hensley had been in Toe Fat with Cliff Bennett and a certain Lee Kerslake, who was to prove to be very useful to the band soon after Look at Yourself.

Look At Yourself (1971), the band’s third album, still is the ultimate Uriah Heep hard rock album to many. The cover is great; it’s a mirror, look at yourself! Get it?

Mick Box still Looking at Yourself in 2016. (Photo by Harpic Bryant, Our Mistress of the Lens.) More from this stunning photographer here: https://mottthedog.com/category/harpic-of-breezeridge-photography/

Opening with the title track, it hurtles out of the tracks like some demented heavy metal demon. Hensley and Box thrash out the song’s riff. Extraordinarily, Ken Hensley takes lead vocals, leaving David Byron nothing to do. Never mind, the balance is redressed for the rest of the album. Then, after a rampaging guitar solo, the riff is picked up again to bring the song to a rousing crescendo, with the percussionists from Osibisa brought in to add their sound to the climax.

The pace does not let up by the following song, ‘I Wanna Be Free,’ as the chorus is driven along by a pounding beat, but with sympathetic vocals and fine musical flourishes, with all the guitars in the band standing out.

At track three is probably Uriah Heep’s most famous song, ‘July Morning,’ a song that no version of the band could ever contemplate going on stage and not playing before they leave. It must have also been licensed out to every ‘Best of Hard Rock’ album ever made. After Ken Hensley’s strident organ chords open the song up, Mick Box takes the song to a higher level with some truly rockin’ guitar before the whole thing is brought down to allow David Byron’s vocals to take over. The song is a loving ten minutes long, showing the full range of all the soloists, building to many crescendos before reaching a dramatic conclusion with everybody having a go at the solos and Manfred Mann brought into the studio to add his deft touch on the Moog synthesizer – a classic rock song.

The following songs on the album are not an anti-climax. ‘Tears In My Eyes’ is a great little rock‘n’roll song with lots of loud guitars, and the harmony vocals would not do shame to any of the great American vocal groups of the fifties.

Click here for more stunning photography by Harpic Bryant

*Mick Box in 2016. (Photo by Harpic Bryant, Our Mistress of the Lens.)*

‘Shadows Of Grief’ is another epic song that perhaps never gets the recognition of some of its peers. Maybe this is because there just was no room for it in the live set with all its twists and turns, but it is like a hidden treasure on the album. It has aged very well even though it still glorifies the use of stereo with all the instruments and vocals switching from one speaker to the other in dramatic fashion as if the band had found a new toy to play with.

Finally, the band drops the pace a little, as if needing to catch their breath, with the beautiful ballad ‘What Should Be Done.’ There is nothing wrong with having one ballad on a rock album as long as they do not dominate proceedings. The album is brought to a rollicking conclusion by ‘Love Machine,’ a number that just rocks, bringing the music to a conclusion as it did Uriah Heep’s live set at the time.

A job well done; Look At Yourself was the first Uriah Heep album to break into the American Top 100 and the British Top 30. Of course, the band would hit pay dirt with the next year’s Demons and Wizards album, but would it all have been possible without a good look at yourself?

Over the next forty-odd years, Uriah Heep did make some awful yawn-inducing albums (like Fallen Angel in 1978). But make no mistake, Look At Yourself is a diamond-hard jewel.