Deep Purple, ‘SPLAT!': Album Review

Deep Purple has been on a creative burn, if you will, in recent times. SPLAT! is the quintet's fourth album in the past six years, all recorded with producer Bob Ezrin. The group has gone through a major change as well, with guitarist Steve Morse stepping down after a 28-year tenure and Simon McBride stepping in for 2024's =1. But there's been a uniformly high caliber of performance that belies the ages of the revered Mark II veterans — 80-year-old singer Ian Gillan, still full of sexual entendres, and bassist Roger Glover (80) and drummer Ian Paice (70) — as well as keyboardist Don Airey (78).

SPLAT!, Deep Purple's 24th studio album, continues to advance the economy of song that the band has been pursuing on its most recent efforts, too. All 13 tracks are tightly constructed — nothing over five minutes and most under four — yet still manage to cover a lot of ground and give McBride and Airey plenty of room to stretch. Their back-and-forth exchanges are sharp throughout, particularly on tracks such as "Arrogant Boy," "The Only Horse in Town," "Guilt Trippin'," the fleet-fingered "Jessica's Bra" and "Third Call."

Hammond organ is still the go-to in Airey's arsenal, but he mixes things up more this time out, with jazzy piano licks on "The Beating of Wings" and "Guilt Trippin'" and synthesizers on "Sacred Land" and "Scriblin' Gib'rish." The effect is like listening to a compact incarnation of 70s favorites such as In Rock and Fireball, with an often prog-styled heaviness flavoring the hard rock drive. Paice even pounds and grooves as hard as he did 50-plus years ago and really goes to town on the surging "Third Call."

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Gillan — who last year revealed he's lost most of his vision — is in good, familiar voice, too. He hasn't lost any of his lyrical idiosyncrasies either, whether it's the friends-with-benefits celebration of "Third Call" or the fantastical wordscapes in "Sacred Land" and "The Beating of Wings."

There's no theme here per se, but Gillan does populate the songs with cautionary tales and characters falling from grace, some reflection on aging and tongue-in-cheek macho posturing ("I'm a sophisticated man with the emphasis on fist"). He also laces tracks such as "Diablo," "The Only Horse in Town" and "Jessica's Bra" with vivid cinematic detail. All of this speaks to a band that's still in fierce form and decidedly in rock as it nears its 60th anniversary. The battle is raging on — for now, and hopefully for some time to come.