Leaf Hound, Live in Japan 2012: Unleashed in the East
Posted in Reviews on January 29th, 2014 by JJ KoczanIf you’re ever looking to win an award for understatement, call Peter French‘s resumé “enviable.” In 1971, the same year Leaf Hound put out their seminal Growers of Mushroom debut LP, French was fronting Atomic Rooster for the In Hearing Of… album, and 1972 found him taking over for Rusty Day in Cactus for ‘Ot ‘n’ Sweaty. It was a short period of time, but a few landmark contributions. Though Growers of Mushroom was widely bootlegged and officially reissued along the way, Leaf Hound wouldn’t put out another record until 2007’s Unleashed. With French up front, guitarist Luke Rayner, bassist Ed Pearson and drummer Jimmy Rowland, they’d begun playing out again circa 2004, released a live single through Rise Above in 2006 as a precursor to the album, continuing to tour and do periodic shows. They appeared at Roadburn in 2006 and 2012 both — at the latter playing Growers of Mushroom in full — and at Desertfest in 2012, and in July of that year did two nights in Tokyo that are now presented through Ripple Music as the Live in Japan 2012 CD/DVD (or LP/DVD) package. It’s noteworthy for a few reasons, among them that although they switched out Pearson for Peter Herbert on bass, this incarnation of Leaf Hound had already been active more than five years, over twice as long as the band’s original run.
Of course, Leaf Hound continues in large part to be defined by Growers of Mushroom and the swagger of that era, something that French‘s voice is able to convey some 40 years later on Live in Japan, but on the CD, cuts from Unleashed feature pretty heavily as well. And where the studio version of that album didn’t quite convey the same kind of spontaneous edge, on stage in Tokyo the newer material meshes well with the old, so that original cuts like “Freelance Fiend” — as signature a riff as the band has — “Work My Body” and “With a Minute to Go” fit easily alongside “Barricades,” “Stop, Look and Listen,” and “One Hundred and Five Degrees.” A vinyl-ready 38 minutes for the audio portion concludes with the Howlin’ Wolf cover “Evil,” which Cactus also covered prior to French joining. There are a few bold exclusions from the CD, including “Sad Road to the Sea” and “Growers of Mushroom,” but the former seems not to have been played at all and the latter appears on the DVD with an extended jam featuring a bass solo from Herbert and subsequent guitar spaceout from Rayner that presumably would’ve put the audio over a vinyl runtime. Add to that the jam in “Work My Body” and maybe Leaf Hound were concerned about upsetting the flow of the audio or repeating themselves too much. Still, as omissions go, those are noteworthy ones for fans of the band.