Ian McLagan & The Bump Band Rise & Shine!

After reviewing the quintessential Faces box, Five Guys Walk into a Bar…, it’s only fitting that we follow it up with a noticeable effort by one of the members of that band, Ian McLagan.  McLagan got his start in early rock’s Small Faces which blossomed into the hard-rocking, genre-defining, heart of Rock n Roll, The Faces.  McLagan’s unmistakable keyboard work was as important to the sound of the Faces as much as any other key member.

The marriage of Faces and their fans ended all too abruptly, caused largely by self-absorption and an unnamed individual, who, incidentally, hasn’t been heard from for 25 years.  The splintered band spread across the rock spectrum like a nuclear explosion with varying results.  But while we’re left with a small but rich legacy and an ache in our collective hearts, that collapse didn’t keep the spirit of The Faces from hovering over the waters of rock n roll.

Ian McLagan went on to work with a pantheon of performers including The Stones, Springsteen, Dylan, Raitt, Etheridge, and even The Stray Cats.  McLagan found time in all that busyness to record solo efforts beginning with 1979’s excellent Little Troublemaker.  Which brings us to the present and his new album, titled Rise & Shine!, with his assembled Bump Band.

Rise & Shine! is a rollicking collection of 11 well written songs that immediately begs the question of how many of these songs would have sounded if Stewart sang them, if Wood played guitar and slide on them, if Lane and Jones kept time for them, if McLagan played on it…<POP>.  The reverie is over but you get my point.  While McLagan plays on this album - it is his album after all - the songs are written and played in the same geography that The Faces traveled with a few departures.

The album starts up-tempo with a rocked-up “You’re My Girl” giving way to a boogie-fied 2^nd track, “Been a Long Time” that sounds Beatlesesque, and refreshingly so.  Undercurrents of reggae style makes up the spin of “”Date With an Angel” while the rest of the album is filled with a nod to every style of essential rock n roll. Our love affair with the aging but timeless rock styles found on this album is sweetly nostalgic. Every song on Rise & Shine! brings a little warmth to the fire that burns within us, the passion that we have for that "old time rock n roll". Rise & Shine! provides us with plenty of guitar, great keyboards, and enough rock and roll to keep us spinning this CD and, otherwise, keeping it close at hand.

The Bump Band is no shake off.  They’re able musicians that can capture the flow of McLagan’s intent, which is to create an album of engaging tunes that reflect the spirit of rock and roll, and not only of the Faces’ legacy.  The music of today’s bands is an amalgam of several eras.  It’s special when an album the quality of the appropriately titled Rise & Shine! is available from one of the forerunners of Rock.  It serves to not only entertain the disenfranchised like us old hippies but it is there to historically mark the pathways of our heritage with sidelights.  Those same sidelights provide safe passage for the youth of our time, leading them to the stuff that helped to bring us to now.

Every time that I put this album on, I fall under a spell.  Call it sadness for a lost friend, call it appreciation for a beautiful thing, call it what you will.  To me, it’s the price that  McLagan sings of in his song, “The Price of Love”.

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Release Date: March 23, 2004
Tracks: 11 - Time: 45:28
Produced by: Various
Format: CD
Website: www.macspages.com

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