Ten Years After – Ssssh.

TYA never got enough love. This is a great album. If you like blues rock this is a must listen.

looks like an early-mid 70's press. hard cardboard laminated gatefold sleeve and lucid good quality vinyl

Sounds thin and tinny. Many Spanish presses from the period sound great (e.g. Beatles or Led Zep issues), but this one sure is disappointing.

Had it not been for Woodstock, Ten Years After may have remained out of the public spotlight, though welcomed by the underground, where musical tastes that were just a bit off center were not only welcomed, but appreciated.

There are those who would like you to believe that Ssssh was more focused and less tentative than any of their previous outings, where I’m not sure that’s the case, as Ten Years After have always come across delightfully unfocused for me. That said, Ssssh does leave by the wayside most of their psychedelic meanderings, refocusing themselves with a more definitive blues-rock vision, one suitable for the guitar soloing of Alvin Lee. Yet still, I throughly enjoyed their foray into psychedelia, though perhaps the genre was tossed aside and taken less seriously by many as of 1969, where I felt that the band never got the chance to invasion themselves as a psych outfit with a blues-rock foundation.

Nevertheless, it’s a solid album to be sure, a mumbling stoned groove laden grind of guitar driven numbers that slowly build and crescendo with climatic precision that leaves you nearly out of breath. On flipping to side two, circumstances shift gears, with the album sounding more relaxed, even pastoral in fashion, defined by the acoustic guitar driven slow building number “If You Should Love Me,” before retracing all you’d heard on side one.

Despite the rather awkward, or should I say ugly album art, for it’s time Ten Years After selected and wrote their material wisely. “Two Time Mama” features some brilliant and wonderful slide guitar, where I always felt surrounded by a wave of guitar playing (which were over dubbed) that nearly folds into and through each other. While most listeners have always been swept way by those dueling guitars, it’s worthy to note the exceptional pleasure found in the vocals of Alvin Lee, where he delivers the songs with clarity and passion, sometimes nearly conversationally, as if one is in the same room with him.

The 60’s were very strange days indeed, most music fans had no concept of the blues, Americans were unaware of their own bright heritage, where it took British artists to acquaint us with these atmospheric riffs of sexual overtures. In so doing, and in hindsight, I might suggest that far too may covers of blues songs were laid down by Ten Years after during their heyday, yet during those days, those numbers were like beacons, shiny coins strewn along the road one could not avoid.

*** The Fun Facts: The album cover was from a photo taken by Graham Nash of The Hollies and later of Crosby, Stills & Nash.

As to the band’s name: By 1966 the original name, Jaybirds, was sounding a bit dated, and briefly worked as the Bluesyard, though both these names were far too close to The Yardbirds, so they decided to honor the musical ears that had so stimulated them, ten years after the start of rock n’ roll (ten years after Elvis Presley’s breakout in 1956) … though guitarist Leo Lyons claims to have pulled the name from a magazine advertising the book “Suez Ten Years After” (referencing the Suez Crisis) hence the truer genesis of such an unforgettable moniker.

Review by Jenell Kesler

Mine's kind of a mix between this etched runout and that of https://www.discogs.com/Ten-Years-After-Ssssh/release/13553892
(side 1): CHR1083-A3 TX
(side 2): CHR.1083B.TLC-A GC. *bullseye symbol*
Label says CHR 1083 on both sides, as does the upper right backside corner of the sleeve

this is a great, great album, better than any led zep album. the pinnacle of blues rock? perhaps..

Released in UK 1975 by Chrysalis Records. See Chrysalis catalogue.