Jimmy Page – Outrider

Jethro Tull's drummer Barrymore Barlow is on this fantastic record

Its a pretty spotty album-like a whole bunch of different recording sessions all tossed together equaling something of album length. I guess I'm used to things being more cohesive in terms of JP projects. This has all the earmarks of an afterthought 'weekend warrior' type of music project. There are appearances from a variety of well known rock musicians including Robert Plant (making it maybe the last "heavy metal style" tunes Jimmy Page & Robert Plant ever recorded together) & Barrymore Barlow of Jethro Tull fame and an assortment of other lessor known singers. I saw a video from this album of the track 'Wasting My Time' and I wasn't very impressed with it. I thought the tune had timing issues as in it was not being played at the right speed-a touch too slow-which maybe made it a substandard rock effort-kind of a "shot in the dark" at the commercial radio rock thing whereas the other tracks were like stuff from rejected movie soundtrack efforts and hit/miss midnight New Orleans blues club jam sessions where everyone has already had about five drinks and nobody cared too much about anything. All in all only for diehard Page fanatics who 'have to have everything.' Definitely nowhere near as good as a Led Zeppelin album or even a Firm album-or dare I say it-not even as good as 1993's Coverdale Page thing which actually did make some serious rock noise in its own unique way. This album would probably please some fans of blues guitar but it wouldn't impress all fans of blues guitar. I thought the Page/Plant track was strange-the lyrics were like beat poetry going in circles-so even though the track was more musically sophisticated than the earlier Page/Plant creations-it just came off sounding odd.