![]() In stark terms, it spells out the album’s central tension, caught as it is between the hope of a brighter future and the weight of the present day. Despite its insistence on resilience and its somewhat uplifting melody, it paints a bleak picture of near-total ruin. The penultimate track, “I Could Almost Cry,” might be the single most disquieting. Kim Petras Announces Debut Album Feed The Beast “Ballad of the Unknown” reckons with what it means to be left behind by the world at large, its final line rendered all the more ominous by its quiet urgency: “How long can this go on?” As a result, most of the songs have a similar undercurrent of bittersweetness and nostalgia to them.Įach track has a different inflection and tells a different story or hints at a different set of circumstances, although these differences can be subtle. The sense of heaviness is understandable given the circumstances of the album’s conception, given that it was written and recorded entirely during the pandemic. Even the upbeat opening track features the recurring line, “I hope it all works out, it always works out,” leaving listeners to wonder if Torrey and Burkum are the ones they’re trying to reassure. Even songs like “Is It Over,” sung in the voice of a washed-up singer waiting for the hook, are delivered with a grin and a winking sense of humor.ĭespite the high note that One Day begins on and the sense that better days are on their way, the Cactus Blossoms never quite manage to shake their palpable sense of gloom. They keep up that optimism through songs like “Not the Only One” and “Love Tomorrow,” which have a more straightforwardly earnest hopefulness about them. Too bad the illustrious members of Cactus would quickly lose interest in this band project and deliver increasingly mediocre efforts in the years that followed.According to Torrey, the brothers were preoccupied with the idea of silver linings, and One Day gets off to an accordingly optimistic start with “Hey Baby,” a breezy, innocent road trip track that paints a picture of all the fun things there are to look forward to down the road. And we digress - for the blistering closing duo of "Oleo" and "Feel So Good" (complete with bass and drum solo slots) easily certifies the Cactus LP as one of the best hard rock albums of the then brand-new decade, bar none. The already quasi-legendary Vanilla Fudge rhythm section of Bogert and Appice may have provided the backbone of the band's business cards, and soulful, ex- Amboy Duke Rusty Day brought the voice, but it was arguably former Detroit Wheels guitarist Jim McCarty who was the true star in the Cactus galaxy, spraying notes and shredding solos all over album highlights such as "You Can't Judge a Book By the Cover," "Let Me Swim," and, most notably, a manic, turbocharged version of "Parchman Farm." The fact that Cactus chose to tackle this classic blues song just a year after it'd been blasted into the fuzz-distortion stratosphere by Blue Cheer betrays - at best - a healthy competitive spirit within the early-'70s hard rock milieu, and at worst it suggests something of a mercenary nature to Cactus' motives, but that's an issue for the surviving bandmembers to duke it out over in the retirement home. Cactus may have never amounted to anything more than a half-hearted, last-minute improvised supergroup, but that don't mean their eponymous 1970 debut didn't rock like a mofo.
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