IF 2 RARE ORIGINAL UK ISLAND LABEL JAZZ PROG PSYCH LP

£ 34

$ 45

£ 34 Sold For

Oct 11, 2010 Sold Date

Oct 4, 2010 Start Date

£ 20 Start price

3 Number Of Bids

Netherlands Country Of Seller

eBay Auctioned at

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Description

Original UK pressing on the pink rim Island label from 1970. The original matt sleeve with metallic effect is in very good+ contition and the record is in excellent condition.

Here are some reviews:
If’s second album perfectly complements the first, the songwriting generally isn’t as strong but includes one of their best songs “Sunday Sad”.
The first track “Your City is Falling” is very up-tempo fast jazz playing and includes a great sax solo, and also good keyboards from John Mealing and drums from Dennis Elliot. The slower eight-minute “Sunday Sad” has a spanish guitar style and flute intro, with a haunting vocal from JW Hodkinson. The song builds into a Chicago style jam and features some good keyboard and heavy guitar solos, very reminiscent of early King Crimson dare I say. Not such a sad song at all. The next track the up-tempo “Tarmac T Pirate and the Lonesome Nymphomaniac” features some great interplay between the band members. Another oustanding eight-minute track, the rock orientated “I Couldn’t Write and Tell You” ebbs and flows around solid keyboards and drums . The AOR sounding “Shadows and Echoes” changes pace and builds into a much more jazz orientated sound, and includes a very fast jazzy guitar solo. The last track, the odd sounding “A Song for Elsa, Three Days Before Her 25th Birthday”, fast jazz alternating with slow bluesy sax solos.
A good follow-up to If 1, released the same year and includes the same high standard of playing.

and another one:
If’s second album is certainly their crowning achievement of sorts, but I personally prefer their debut. With an unchanged line-up, but a few tours (including US tour with Black Sabbath and Rod Stewart), they even recorded this album in NY, with Morrissey and Quincy again taking the lion’s share of the songwriting to them.
Opening up on the soulful Your City Is Falling, the track’s best moments are the excellents drum breaks around the end of the track. The following Sunday Sad starts on a pastoral electric Spanish-sounding guitar mixed with a quiet flute, soon joined by Hodgkinson’s soulful vocals, but Smith’s psych guitar solo takes the show, excellently underlined by the pulsing and flamencoing bass of Richardson. Lonesome Nymphomaniac (a rare Mealing composition) is not my fave on this album, partly because it’s a bit messy in the recording, most notably the very shallow space allotted for most of the instruments in the stereo space.
The flipside starts on the lengthy Motown-like track, but soon digresses into a series of excellent solos, including an epic guitar solo. Fellow British jazzer writes the next Shadows And Echoes, where after a full-fledged jazz tour of the group, the guitar gets very jazzy this time around. The closing Song For Elsa is much more of a Colosseum track than most of the rest of the album, with the two saxes again pulling a Heckstallian trick every now and then.

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