After losing founding member Jon Lord, Deep Purple emerged with the twilit reverie of “All the Time in the World,” a ruminative song that spoke to passages. With “Hell To Pay,” however, they return to the locomotive glories of the band’s youth.
The second advance track from Now What?!, Deep Purple’s first album of new material in eight years, positively bursts out — with Don Airey’s gurgling keyboards bolstering a cocksure lyric via Ian Gillan. “That,” as he urgently proclaims here, “is the way it’s meant to be.”
After a boisterous chorus, guitarist Steve Morse digs deeper into a grimy groove, before unleashing a solo that begins as a simmering retort and then ramps up into a tornadic flurry. Meanwhile, drummer Ian Paice and bassist Roger Glover keep a furious pace, later bolstered by a series of sharply constructed asides from Airey.
It’s as close to classic Deep Purple as we’re likely to get at this late date, with Paice the only co-founding member left. (Gillan and Glover joined a year after Paice, in 1969. Morse followed Ritchie Blackmore’s departure in the 1990s; Airey followed Lord in 2002.) Both “Hell to Pay” and “All the Time in the World,” are set to be released on March 29, 2013, via earMusic. The Bob Ezrin-produced Now What?! follows in April.
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Y’know, some of those latter day Deep Purple albums are pretty good: in particular Perpendicular (1997 I think) and Bananas (2003) were both pretty solid (despite Bananas having one of the stoopidest albums covers EVER). The problem is that when the public remembers you for greatness (i.e., the early 70s Mark II version of Deep Purple), pretty good just doesn’t seem good enough. Bit I’m thinking that if you liked the two aforementioned albums, Now What will be pretty fine as well.