GLENN HUGHES — Building the Machine (review)

GLENN HUGHES — Building the Machine album cover

Album · 2001 · Hard Rock

3/5 · 2021-03-28
lukretion

It is always a pleasure to listen to new music by Glenn Hughes, “The Voice of Rock”. His performances with Trapeze and Deep Purple in the 1970s have granted him a place among the greats in the Rock Olympus. Since then, Hughes has worked on a myriad of collaborations and projects, as well as pursued a successful solo career, with thirteen full-length albums of original music to date. Building the Machine is his eight solo album and was released in 2001 on SPV. Together with Hughes, who also plays bass on the album, we find his long-time collaborators, guitarist JJ Marsh and drummer Gary Ferguson, as well as keyboardist Vince DiCola, who provides some tasteful Hammond on several tracks. There is also a score of illustrious guests, including Pat Travers (guitar and vocals on Rare Earth’s cover “I Just Want To Celebrate”), Bobby Kimball (Toto, providing backing vocals on a couple of songs), and jazz pianist John Beasley (on the light ballad “I Will Follow You”).

There are not many surprises in the eleven tracks of the album. The music of Building the Machine reflects the love for hard rock, blues, funk and soul that Hughes has always professed throughout his musical career. Be it original songs or covers (Rare Earth’s “I Just Want To Celebrate” and Deep Purple’s “Highball Shooter”), Glenn Hughes’ trademark voice and funky bass grooves are the force that drives the music. Unsurprisingly, his vocal performance is huge. His wails and cries add sparkle to the muscular hard rock of the opening duo “Can’t Stop the Flood” and “Inside”, which are probably the best pieces of the album. Elsewhere Hughes puts in more soulful performances, like on the moving ballads “Beyond the Numb” and “Big Sky”, both dedicated to two friends whom Hughes lost to the demons of alcohol and drugs. But it is in another ballad, “Feels Like Home”, that the album packs its strongest emotional punch. This song starts slowly with a delicate acoustic guitar part accompanying Hughes’ soulful vocals, before building into a powerful bluesy mid-tempo that brings the track to an engrossing ending. The funk and soul influences appear more strongly on “Don’t Let It Split Away”, which features some nice vocal harmonies between Hughes and Bobby Kimball (Toto), and on Rare Earth’s cover “I Just Want To Celebrate”. The other cover, Deep Purple’s “Highball Shooter”, sounds completely at ease among the remaining ten tracks of the album, almost as if time had stopped and we were still in 1973, rocking hard with the rest of Deep Purple.

Perhaps paradoxically, this is both the main strength and weakness of the album. On the one hand, it shows that Hughes still firmly possesses that hard rock mojo that made him famous in the 70s. His performance is as credible and as genuine as thirty years prior, which is great to see. However, at the same time, there is nothing on this album that you cannot find elsewhere in Hughes’ discography. There is also no track that particularly stands out, with the exception perhaps of the opener “Can’t Stop the Flood”. The other tracks are all of good quality, but there is nothing that really sparkles and makes your jaws drop, especially if compared with the rest of the man’s discography.

Building the Machine is nevertheless a pleasant album to listen to, especially if you are a fan of this kind of blues/funk-tinged hard rock. It features some excellent playing and a strong vocal performance by Hughes. It does not add nor subtract much from Hughes’ considerable career, it is more of the same. But when the quality is as high as this, it is really hard to complain.