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The Global Broad Band - "Freedom"/"Free Palestine"

The ever enterprising Tim Jones and friends from Stone Premonitions have founded yet another new project last year and this time it's called The Global Broad Band. A general theme seems to be freedom. In addition to Tim (vocals, guitar, bass) we've got the project's other songwriter Paddi (drums, guitars, keyboards, bass and backing vocals), Terri-B (backing vocals) and Dave Hendry (keyboards).

Freedom EP includes six tracks worth of nice, progressive and a bit psychedelic pop-rock. The under three-minute-long "Waddya Want" starts off the EP in a pretty fast and straight-forward way. During the song we get to hear quite a long list of things that should be changed to make our world a better place. The little more peaceful, excellent "Free Palestine" speaks out for the problems in Palestine and musically it brings to mind Rush. "In the Image" is a rather exciting, sort of creeping and hypnotic piece with some great backing vocals. The lyrics are about people killing each other so that the leaders can get even richer. The monotonic and quite small-scale "This England" concentrates on the problems of modern England, "A Different Kind" is wacky rock 'n roll also including some killer solo guitar work. The EP's longest track is the over six-minute-long, very good mid-tempo piece "Perpetual Motion" that sounds a little bit like latter day Gong. This song has been previously heard on the album of their Stone Premonitions 2010 project but this is a new version I believe. Sounds great, anyway!

Free Palestine EP includes the original version of the track as well as three different mixes. The over eight-minute-long Dave Hendry Remix 1 is wonderful, soft and almost instrumental floating ambient. The Rapoon Mix that clocks in at huge 19 minutes is at first focused mostly on vocals while the electronic beats win over later on. The Dave Hendry Remix 2 is very nice, electronic space dance music and in fact works very well. This reminds me quite a lot of Astralasia, as does some of Hendry's awesome solo material too (Ohead). All these remixes offer new dimensions to this very good song so this disc is definitely worth getting as well! You can buy both EP's for five pounds each.

By DJ Astro, Psychotropic Zone web site (http://www.unimeri.com/PsychotropicZone)