DEEP PURPLE – Infinite

Deep Purple’s new album Infinite cleverly has the “dp” logo forming an infinity loop on the cover’s center, echoing every artist’s desire for their work to have infinite impact. Listeners desire also to have an infinite amount of new music from artists they love. These desires run especially strong with bands who have careers and catalogues as enduring as Purple’s—next year will mark the 50^th anniversary of their first album, Shades Of Deep Purple. But new material from a revered band is invariably met with equal levels of excitement and fear—what if the legends have lost the plot?

Fortunately, with Infinite Purple banish that fear before the first song is finished. “Time For Bedlam” segues quickly from an ominous spoken opening to a solid wall of sound.  Eight of the nine tracks that follow combine classic Deep Purple elements—the foundation of rhythm, the flourishes and solo-trading of keyboard and guitar, the classic Gillan wail on “Get Me Out Of Here”—with new touches that make the material at once familiar and fresh.  Gillan is his usual masterful self, handling the bluesy rockers like “One Night In Vegas” and moody slower material like “The Surprising” with equal deftness. The one exception is a superfluous run-through of The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues”. Here Gillan sounds bored, his delivery laconic, lacking the urgent, shamanistic tone of the original. It isn’t a poor rendition exactly, but why bother?  Despite the misstep, Infinite is a very strong, very heavy album, one certain to excite legacy listeners and new fans alike.

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