UFO's period of greatest fame and relevance as a band occurred more than 30 years ago. In the year 2010, they're the sort of band that plays every couple of years at whatever "Friday weekend kickoff" type venue is nearest you, most likely to an audience of middle-aged people who listened to them back in the day. There are tons of bands like this, still touring at a fairly advanced age, and inevitably, their only claim to even being that original band from 30-40 years ago is the presence of the original drummer or bassist. He's the guy who managed to be the last man standing after all the other members drifted away, and he's filled his band with twentysomething ringers who draw a steady paycheck running through a workmanlike set of songs written before they were born. UFO haven't quite gone that route; of their prime-era mid-70s lineup, they've retained singer Phil Mogg, drummer Andy Parker, and keyboardist/rhythm guitarist Paul Raymond, making their claim on laurels long past more legitimate than most. They've rounded out their lineup with guitarist Vinnie Moore, an 80s-era solo guitar also-ran from the time of instrumental shredders like Steve Vai and Yngwie J. Malmsteen (he also played for a short time in Alice Cooper's band). One would assume that there's also a bass player in the current version of UFO, but whoever he is, he's anonymous enough not to be credited anywhere in Best Of A Decade's liner notes--he's in the background of a picture on the inside cover, but that's it.
Before receiving this CD for review, I'd heard a lot of discussion about UFO, nostly due to recent critical re-evaluation of the early 70s proto-metal era. People mentioning their name in the same breath as Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple, and Uriah Heep certainly piqued my curiosity, as did the notorious quote from Charlie Benante of Anthrax--"The only band that ever used keyboards that was good was UFO"--which was deconstructed at length by Chuck Klosterman in his book Fargo Rock City. However, before putting on Best Of A Decade for the first time, I'd never actually heard UFO's music. The beginning of the album was an unpleasant surprise; instead of getting the powerful, heavy sound I'd expected, I was greeted with the blustering of a middle-aged white-guy blues group attempting to recapture the early 70s sound of bands like Bad Company or The Faces. I found myself thinking of the new music that gets played on classic rock stations--recent recordings by longtime veterans like Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, or even the modern, reconstituted version of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Compared to the prime-era work of these veterans, their modern stuff sounds terrible--cliched lyrics, hackneyed songwriting, and the kind of soulless exhibitions of "chops" that you'd hear on a guitar store sales floor. It might fool the fifty-somethings who are listening to that station to relive their youth; most of them have stopped critically engaging with new music anyway, so it's not hard to trick them. But anyone who is looking for real quality, rather than an uninspired trotting out of genre signifiers that were tired decades ago, had better look elsewhere. "This is what UFO sounds like?" I thought, listening to the first couple of songs on Best Of A Decade. "They have not stood the test of time."
I realized my mistake, though, when track three started. Track three is the song "Lights Out," one of six live recordings on this 16-song CD. The ten studio recordings all come from UFO's last three studio albums, You Are Here (2004), The Monkey Puzzle (2006), and The Visitor (2009). By contrast, the six live songs presented here were all originally released between 1974 and 1977, and all but one were cowritten by Michael Schenker, the band's most famous and talented member--conspicuous here by his absence. These six songs all feature the sort of intense heaviness that I'd expected from UFO. "Lights Out" in particular is an outstanding song, with an organ sound reminiscent of Deep Purple circa Machine Head. Clearly, this is the sound that made UFO famous in the first place. And it's a really good sound, one that even the middle-aged version of UFO is able to do justice. If you ripped the six live songs from this CD to your computer and put them on your ipod, you'd have a nifty little live EP to listen to.
So why is this sound in so little evidence on Best Of A Decade? Now would be a great time for UFO to capitalize on the renewed interest in proto-metal bands of the 70s with a full career retrospective. In light of that fact, why is two-thirds of this collection made up of uninspired blues workouts that no one cares about? It almost certainly has to do with issues of rights. UFO are on a different label now than they were in their prime era, and their original label, EMI, has done quite a few bonus-heavy reissues of their back catalog recently. The members who played on those original albums are undoubtedly getting royalty checks from those reissues, but the only way UFO's current incarnation can make any money from record sales is if those sales are on their current label. The hope is that fans who pick up Best Of A Decade to hear the songs they know will enjoy the songs they don't know enough to buy copies of other recent UFO albums. Unfortunately, if my experience is any indication, this anthology will have the opposite effect. Instead of turning me on to more recent UFO material, the juxtaposition of recent songs with great songs from their prime era only made the recent songs seem that much worse. In isolation, I might be able to find something worthwhile in a few of the studio songs here; "Heavenly Body" has some real heaviness to it, and "Baby Blue" is significantly better than most ballads, based as it is around a very nice minor-key melody. But then one of the awesome live songs--"Shoot Shoot," say, or "This Kid's"--comes on, and any positive thoughts about the studio material evaporate amidst the realization that it can't hold a candle to the greatness of prime-era UFO.
There's some nobility to the idea of middle-aged road warriors carrying on long after the sellout crowds have dispersed, playing their music to whoever is willing to listen and drawing steady working-class paychecks doing what they love. If that's an idea you believe in, and you're already a UFO fan, then you should go catch them (and some of the many other bands like them--Skid Row, Blue Oyster Cult, Anvil, etc.) when they roll through your town. They'll probably play all of the songs you love by them, and you'll almost certainly have a good time at the show. And when you walk up to their merch table after the set, if you want to support them by picking up a CD, then Best Of A Decade is a good choice. The live tracks are decent, it's not hard to skip the crappy studio tracks when they come up, and no one involved in the transaction is under any illusion that you're going to listen to that CD very often anyway. But if you're trying to figure out why UFO is a venerated live act in the first place, and how they can still make a living on the road three decades after they were popular, you should probably look for your answers in the used vinyl section of your favorite record store. Those original albums are the ones that made UFO great, and this anthology is not an adequate replacement for them.
