Flat Baroque & Berserk

Magnet (p.108) - "[The album] is great; Harper sings vivid and erudite lyrics with winning understatement and sets them to music that weds Dylanesque talking blues to an updated British Isles melodicism..." Down Beat (p.71) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "FLAT BAROQUE AND BERSERK was Harper's fourth album, originally released in 1970, and it still exudes the power and confidence of a daunting young talent spreading his wings." Dirty Linen (p.53) - "On 'I Hate the White Man' and 'Don't You Grieve,' Harper sounds like folk-era Bob Dylan, with strident vocals accompanied only by guitar and harmonica." Signal To Noise (p.58) - "On songs such as 'Tom Tiddler's Ground,' Harper sounds like a traditional English folkie, where other tracks show him moving toward a folk-rock style reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's acoustic tracks."

Roy Harper's fourth album found him in an acoustic folkie mode more often than not, though as usual (for circa late-'60s Harper) there were detours into pretty rocky items on occasion. It's not much of either a progression or a slide from the lyrically convoluted, somewhat but not incredibly melodic path he had established with his prior work. "I Hate the White Man," however, is certainly one of his most notable (and notorious) compositions, a spew of lilting verbiage that's hard to peg. It could be irony, it could be ironic self-hatred, it could be muddled reflections on the chaos that is the modern world, or it could be a combination of all of them. There are gentler items, sometimes with subdued harmony vocals and orchestration, that sound rather like Harper's most acerbic side sanded off with edges of Al Stewart, Donovan, or Tim Hardin; "Another Day" is the prettiest of those. The atypical "Hell's Angels," on the other hand, has a twisted, chunky rock feel rather like the solo work of another of producer Peter Jenner's clients, Syd Barrett. ~ Richie Unterberger