Bozzio Levin Stevens, indisputably the world’s most dangerous prog band, was around for just a few years at the end of the 20th century, a shattering union whose pedigree extended from some of the most adventurous acts of the entire rock n’roll era (Frank Zappa, UK, King Crimson, Peter Gabriel) and some of the eighties’ most turbulent dynamos (Missing Persons, Billy Idol, Michael Jackson) as well.
But the two albums they released during that brief spanare ranked among the most challenging, yet vivacious, albums in the entire progressive genre, with the second, Situation Dangerous, setting the bar so high that it has still to be truly matched, all these years later.
Reissued for the first time on October 2, Situation Dangerous was described by the website allaboutjazz.com as the band’s pursuit of “hard driving and altogether potent fusion/prog-rock style themes and tricky time signatures, [executed] with dazzling marksmanship,” at the same time as the musicians “balance the turbo-charged proceedings with joyful harmony and energetic enthusiasm.”
progarchives.com continues, “Eight beautiful pieces of music, well thought, well processed and well presented. The album is balancing between jazz rock/fusion, some flamenco, and heavier hard-rocking (even metal) guitar tunes.”
And allmusic.com singles out the individual musicians for praise – Bozzio delivering “his most explosive and perhaps his most defining work since Danger Money from 1979”; Levin bringing to bear his “entire repertoire of influences and skills”; and Stevens kicking off the album by conjuring “comparisons to manic sound frequently delivered by Robert Fripp…” before delivering “jazz, fusion, classic rock, blues-rock, and flamenco passages with accomplished ease.”
“We knew on paper that we were going to have fun,” Levin said of the trio. “Some of it was not what I’d been expecting. When Steve played the flamenco guitar, our songs went in another direction. I didn’t know how far out we’d go in advance. I know I like to go very far out, but it was a comfortable thing, and I felt like I could play my own thing during Steve’s soloing.”
Stevens continued, “Instrumental music has a very defined market and doing a record like this freed me up. There wasn’t a huge budget and there wasn’t a record company telling me what to do, which was a kind of a liberating experience for me.” Bozzio Levin Stevens, he said, allowed him to demonstrate “a side of my playing that people haven’t heard before…”; hitherto, he admitted, he was best accustomed to “working on records where you don’t play spontaneously.”
Here, that was all he was required to do!
Even more adventurous and head-spinningly complex than its predecessor (Black Light Symphony is also available from Magna Carta), Situation Dangerous is reissued on both CD and, for the first time, vinyl;. In addition, the CD features one bonus track.
CD/VINYL: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=bozzio+levin+stevens+situation+dangerous
Track listing
1. Dangerous
2. Endless
3. Crash
4. Spiral
5. Melt
6. Tragic
7. Tziganne
8. Lost
9. Melt
