Music Review: The Alps - Le Voyage

The Alps are a San Francisco band whose instrumental blend is positively hypnotizing. They have previously been compared to “European soundtrack music,” which is interesting to me, as I have no idea what that would mean. What I do know is their fourth album, Le Voyage is a great one, and a record I have been playing nonstop for the past few weeks now.

My guess is the soundtrack tag stems from the variety of styles The Alps explore. Once upon a time, film soundtracks reflected the various moods of the movie. Pink Floyd’s Obscured By Clouds, from Barbet Schroeder's Le Vallee (1972) is a fine example. The structure of Le Voyage is similar. It is very orderly (as soundtracks usually are), and features a mix of musical flavors. None of this really matters in the end though, as it is the songs themselves that will make or break a record.

Le Voyage is full of glorious music. The acoustic guitar piece “Drop In” opens the disc, and reminds me of a longer version of Steve Hackett’s “Horizons,” from Foxtrot by Genesis. The prog connection is never really too far away from The Alps, but not in the excessive manner that deep-sixed the genre.

Side one is perfectly programmed, with short one-minute interludes separating the longer, more fully realized cuts. The psychedelic “Marzipan” comes after “Drop In,” and leads into the fiery martial drums of “Crossing The Sands.” This track features the best superfuzzed guitar since Mark Farner’s on Grand Funk Railroad’s “Paranoid.”

Fifty-one cute seconds of “Petals” leads us back to sometime in the early seventies, and the beautiful “St. Laurent.” This song does not sound dated in any way though, there is just a laid-back vibe to it that reminds me very much of the era.

Side two dispenses with all the peripheral activity to get down some seriously trippy music. And what better instrument to evoke an elevated mood than the sitar? “Black Mountain” is the revenge of Ravi Shankar on the Quiet Beatle. For here, unlike the clumsy “Within Without You,” the sitar is effortlessly incorporated into the tune as a perfectly appropriate coloring device.

Article Author: Greg Barbrick

Greg Barbrick is a Seattle native who was first published in 1988, in his hometown music magazine, The Rocket. Since then his work has appeared in print and online for numerous sources. He Googles himself so often that his mother told him it would make him go blind.
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