Deep Jimi and the Zep Creams: Better When We´re Dead

Start this album on track 7—‘Don’t Let Your Dreams Go’—which will tell you everything you need to know about the style, approach, personality and proper-rock-song attitude of the now-veterans. It’s an early-70s long-hair Zeppish rocker with a satisfying hint of desperation about it and the lyrics speak for themselves. And with a little bit more guitar hysterics and vocals it could be the White Stripes quite easily. Not that they want to be; the whole point is that this is classic rock played timelessly by a bunch of longhairs who’ve made a few bad decisions in their career but very few, on this evidence, in songcraft. Check out Nothing Can Go Wrong for a perfect example. It’s a niftily-controlled album of prog-tinted hard rock in a just-pre NWOBHM sense—something like Samson circa 1981. This is an LP which isway, way better than the band name.