★★★★★
I don´t know if there are bands that released, re-released and re-re-released more live albums than British outfit Deep Purple. I did the math and arrived at approximately 35 and I´m sure I missed a dozen or so of the more obscure kind. But here we are talking about a live recording, (mostly) done in Stockholm just 5 months after the ground-breaking `In Rock´...
- www.rockreport.be
2014-04-14
★★★★★
Whether Now What?!, the curiously-punctuated latest album from the oldest warhorses of heavy rock still to be operating at stadium level, is really "the best Purple album in 30 years" - as more than a few overexcited Euro-hacks have claimed - is impossible to prove, but it's a decent set of tunes by anyone's standards. High points are Above And Beyond (about the departed Jon Lord, to whom Now What?...
- recordcollectormag.com
2014-01-02
★★★★★
Back in the mid-80s, thereunion of the best knownline-up of Deep Purple (Mk II:Blackmore, Gillan, Lord,Paice, Glover) was big newsin the hard-rock world, andthe subsequent album,Perfect Strangers, went on tobe a fan favourite. Theresultant tour marked a highwatermark in thebandmember's relationshipswith each other, and thiswell-filmed (if visually sparse)show from Australia, in 1985,is an excellent document ofthe era.
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-12-06
★★★★★
It's hard to name a majorrock act from the 70s and80s that didn't flirt at leastoccasionally with the bighair/synths/slick chorusesAOR format. Here's DeepPurple's most extravagantpiece of AOR-ness, originallyreleased in 1990 as if allguitar music wasn't about tobe completely retooled bygrunge and alt.rock.
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-09-12
★★★★★
Deep Purple has gone through so many line-up changes that the first thing fans want to know about a new release is who is in the band. For this set of new music the band consists of singer Ian Gillan, drummer Ian Paice, bass man Roger Glover, longtime guitarist Steve Morse and keys player Don Airey. Lead off track "A Simple Song" begins with a mellow and jazzy, very prog-gy passage, but a couple of minutes in an explosion of loud guitar and organ puts the song in more familiar Purple territory...
- www.antimusic.com
2013-08-02
★★★★★
I was 15 when I first saw Deep Purple. This was 1971, at Belle Vue King's Hall, Manchester. It was my first experience of a live concert and proved suitably thrilling. Three rows in, I felt absorbed by the eerie silence that immediately preceded the band's arrival onstage. The thrilling blackness punctuated by the little red lights of the WEM speakers. Then - POW - band exploded into 'Speed King'...
- thequietus.com
2013-06-08
★★★★★
Taking the respectable age of the band members into account, it's quite logic that the (elder) fans had to wait eight years for a follow-up to the "Rapture Of The Deep" album. That album was nothing special, so to be honest I wasn't really looking forward to a new studio album from these dinosaurs. Preceded by two singles, the ballad "All The Time In The World" and the rocker "Hell To Pay", Purple's 19th studio album "Now What ?!" finally reached us on the last Friday of April 2013...
- www.rockreport.be
2013-04-30
★★★★★
Musical chairs is a frequently played game in the rock biz, giving rise to the notion of a "classic line-up" - ie the point in a band's career when the personnel was settled long enough to produce something truly worthy of celebration. In the case of Deep Purple, the quintet responsible for 1972's Machine Head is commonly regarded as the best of the best...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
These guys really know how to milk a catalog. With arguably a dozen or so real hits, Deep Purple has popped out two dozen live albums, and while I've only heard a small sampling of that aspect of that oeuvre ("oeuvre" sounds sexier than "product") I always gravitate back to those critical dozen hits. (See below). And that's what sets this disc squarely in the middle of the Deep Purple live sets...
- www.ink19.com
2012-04-30