Track Listing:
Surely / It's a Long Road A- / Aubade and I Am Not Like Other Birds of Prey B+ / Words Unspoken A / Maybe I'm a Beggar B / Home Again B / Nothing to Show A / Shadow Song B+ / Try Again B+ / Surely B+


Even though Supertramp is thought-of as a second-wave prog act, their debut album was released only one year after the genre's first-wave of stalwarts Yes, Genesis and King Crimson released their own debut albums. However, the difference between Supertramp and those other bands is they didn't achieve commercial success until 1974, the same timeframe those second-wave prog acts like Styx, Kansas, and Rush started to gain prominence. Hence, this album is really only retroactively famous, recognized chiefly for representing the quasi-obscure, humble beginning of a very popular musical group. However, don't ever dismiss this album as a curiosity; while it's hardly a brilliant piece of work, it's certainly enjoyable in its own right. It doesn't deserve to be dismissed or ignored.

Supertramp was started by Rick Davies who was somehow able to secure financial support from a Dutch millionaire. (I didn't know there were millionaires who did that sort of thing. Now I'm going to have fantasies the rest of the day about being a millionaire from the '60s and '70s funding rock 'n' roll bands.) Davies recruited Roger Hodgson for bass and lead vocals, Richard Palmer to play lead guitar and write lyrics, and Robert Millar on drums. Hodgson and Davies were to become songwriting partners. The other two would exit the band before 1974.

I like to think I eventually would have heard this album even if Supertramp never released anything beyond this. (Of course there are so many bands from this era that I've never heard of, so it might have been 2030 or so before I found it.) Unlike many budding prog acts from 1970, these guys chose to write gentler songs as opposed to the overblown and pretentious things we would oftentimes get from other upstart prog groups. Early Supertramp preferred to make their art subtle and melodic. I'd wager “Words Unspoken” is easily within the 90th-95th percentile of prog songs released in 1970 as far as melody is concerned. There are no other words to describe it than “beautiful.”

But it's obvious to me why this album didn't sell very many copies: It has really no gimmicks to speak of. Instrumentation-wise, I would probably call it 'standard.' I mean, they didn't even use synthesizers or Mellotrons, for pete's sake, which pretty much anyone who was anyone in art-rock was using in 1970. The only weird instrument I notice is a flageolet played by Hodgson in quite a few of these tracks, and a Russian guitar known as a balalaika provided by Palmer. (I'm not sure where the balalaika can be heard, but I would make an educated guess that I'm hearing it play throughout “Shadow Song.”) There's nothing against “gimmicks,” by the way, since they can be very interesting and some of my all-time favorite bands of this era were doing amazing things with synthesizers and Mellotrons. But this surely shows that Davies and Hodgson weren't much for experimentation at least as far as instrumentation is concerned. That was a trait they would bring with them when they cut those famous albums.

If I were to complain about one general thing in this album, it's that there are far too many quiet spots in which they piddle about for lengthy periods of time making vague, quiet jazz-noodles. They're reminiscent of the middle of King Crimson's “Moonchild” except not quite that vague. One reason quiet moments can be great is they make the louder moments seem all the more glorious. The problem is these moments can get so uneventful that I start to space out. “Maybe I'm a Beggar” is a good example of this sort of song, which starts off very slow and threatens to start boring me to tears. But then things pick up when a fueled Cream-inspired rock 'n' roll jam pipes up midway through. ...Oh, I should have mentioned that this album has a lot of jams in it. Perhaps this is more like a polite Traffic album.

That brings me to mention my favorite song on the album, “Nothing to Show,” which starts out loud, energetic, and catchy. A Traffic album would have been all the better if they covered it! I'd be threatened to call it hard-rock, but surely enough it has a piddly quiet section in the middle of it... which is among the more listenable ones of the album due to having a consistent, click-heavy percussion track.

I didn't get around to mentioning very many songs in this album, but maybe I don't have to. I'll close this review by saying that even though this is hardly a great album, it's far better than simply being Supertramp's nearly forgotten debut. If you're a fan of this group's peak material, then check it out. 11/15

Recommended: Yes