Flash: In the Can : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Between the Hefner-sterile tit pictured here and the brief glance of air-brushed and pansy-flowered/pantied ass on this contingent's first album cover, you just know that Flash is dressed down to kill. There are even musical credentials too, especially if your taste runs to the more obscuro/exotic of avant-anglo rock. Pete Banks, undisputed chairman of this board, plays the same guitars with which he once spearheaded the early days of Yes (post-Art Yes, that is), whose increasingly clinical style drove Pete into hiding for over a year, after which he resurfaced in the arms of that epitome of just-another-band-of - bloozoes - from - Barn-stable, Blodwyn Pig. Banks now admits that his experience in that band was more to keep his mouth fed than his head. And so was it with an attitude of if - I - wanna - get - anything-done-around-here ... that he set out eventually to form a band more mature than the boro/bloozers and less pseudo-Orwellian and pristine than Yes.

Enter Ray Bennett, on bass and rounding out this motley band of Banksian conception we find Roger Daltrey look-alike Colin Carter vocalizing with an occasional cameo on low-rise groin, and Mike Hough on the skins. Their first album was promising, if not totally listenable. Yeah, they did sound like Yes, and still do to a certain degree for that matter, but so what? Pete Banks was their guitarist at one point. Besides displaying the aforementioned piece of tush thereon, Flash bandstanded, among other things, the shark-got-im/effete British madmod vocals of Carter, the undeniably Squirian bass of Bennett, Hough's technically sensuous-less percussing and, finally, the saving grace of Banks' sometimes brilliant, highly complex and what-else-can-you-say-but-flash arrangements, Arp and guitaring.

Well, it's still as glitz asever—down to the shimmeringly lightning-quick, triplet guitar runs (Banks' patent trademark since the days of Yes), hopelessly pseudo-galactic lyrics, texturally incongruous arrangements, and, in the final analysis, an unfortunate lack of any real substance. Take Flash in the Can's opener, "Lifetime"—true to Flashesque circus-like style, it is extravagant, elaborate and Ben Hurian. It is also cluttered, a pain in the proverbial to listen to, unfulfilling and, in short, uncomfortable in all of its grandiose and show-offy musical masturbation. (Two gold stars, however, to the person who can detect a cop of the "the hills are alive" line from The Sound of Music.) This piece ends, as do all of the others on this album—every single one, dammit!—with that noted of Beckoid institutions, the old amphetocrash, disturbingly razor-edged tape splice. Ultra-Sado, what?

Eventually, however, we arrive at the only thoroughly cogent conception on the record, a Bennett-penned, refreshingly mellifluous pastoral portrait of melancholy attractiveness entitled "There No More." For this one tune, it seems that the boys have finally traded in their computers, their aimlessly complex Von Hindenburgness for a pleasantly serene ... but, wait a minute, they close it with another of them whiplash tape-splices, and just when everything was getting ... Jeez! (RS 127)

BRUCE MALAMUT