Zan Zone’s Start Where You Stand is a guitar-rock album that just gets things right, with loose elbows, urgent vocals, paused pathos, Americana carnival side-show barker’s guitar solos, and a big-screen fiery rock ‘n’ roll confessional groove.
Zan Zone, led by guitarist/vocalist (and main guy!) Zan Burnham, has been releasing albums and EPs since 1995. Start Where You Stand quite simply burns with classic rock fever. The first three songs join all the puzzle pieces of the glorious ’70s bands.
“Bad Dreams” conjures the melodic guitar drama of Lourie Wisefield-era Wishbone Ash, circa No Smoke Without Fire. The guitars sing with slow beauty and then erupt with great big (and joyous!) riffs. The vocals are two-fold: Zan sings lead with Angela Watson Modeste adding a harmony halo. Then, Philip Dessinger enters the vocal mix (with Arianna Burnham) to produce a rather nice Neil Young and Crazy Horse vibe. Lots of drama here.
Ditto for “Watching the World Go By,” which again, rocks like a pretty great Wishbone Ash tune — with a heaven-sent guitar solo that just makes any attentive cerebral cortex tingle. And there’s a nicely weird vocal interlude to boot before the searing guitars re-renter the groove, which glances at the (sort of) medieval rock of Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow.
The positive pulse continues. “I Won’t Live a Lie” begins with acoustic brush strokes, but suddenly morphs into a psych tune worthy of Love’s brilliant Forever Changes. There’s more dramatic guitar work that conjures the spirit of Arthur Lee. Big compliment, there! The same is true for the folky “Survival,” with its melodically enhanced color and cool late ’60s vibe.
“Extinction Rebellion” is a wonderful instrumental that has the complex clarity of a cuneiform-etched message, the moment after the discovery of that Rosetta Stone. Need I mention Wishbone Ash, again? The tune is (sort of) a SparkNotes summary of the extended jam “F.U.B.B.” at the end of their very fine There’s the Rub album. By the way (lest we forget!) thank you very much to the Saadi Kain and Marko Djordjevic engine room of bass and drums respectively.
That said, then things change. Angela Watson Modeste takes the lead vocal on “Baby Cried,” and the tone becomes slightly soulful, which conjures another dimension of the ’70s sound of bands like Joy of Cooking or Mother Earth (with Wisconsin native Tracy Nelson). The simply titled “That” continues with acoustic insistent (almost) funky sound with male and female intertwined voices, which circle a Jefferson Airplane full of “volunteers” that never ever contemplated becoming a Starship, much less any thought about “building a city on rock ‘n’ roll.”
In truth, this is a very different sound from the earlier cuts, but to its credit, the tune has a wonderful acoustic guitar coda. But that’s all right because “One Step Ahead of the Red” could (almost) be a Pink Floyd blues-rock tune with a grudge against conformity – which of course, includes the mandatory emotive electric guitar solo that drips with David Gilmour’s extended fervor.
Oh my – “Extinction Romp” is an acoustic guitar-led instrumental that (as many albums did in the ’70s) creates a melodic unity, as it reprises a previous song. It’s a nice oasis amidst the rest of the album’s songs. Elsewhere, “Hot and Cold” flows like sweet rock ‘n’ roll lava, with yet another brimstone breathed guitar solo.
Then, “Holding You Tight” ends with an Angela vocal that’s a pleasure-cruise tune of a song, on a boat that just happens to have a pretty decent band on board. The song is a postage stamp on a letter sent to a dear far away friend.
As said, Start Where You Stand breathes with ’70s musical sentiment. It rocks, and it rolls. And it just gets things right, with those really nice loose elbows, urgent vocals, paused pathos, a cornucopia of Americana carnival side show barker’s guitar solos, and an always “forever young” big-screen fiery rock ‘n’ roll “bless me father” forever and a day confessional groove.
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