By David Cohen | Classic Rock
There’s a particular kind of nerve required to call your twenty-fourth studio album Splat! Most bands fifty-plus years into a career reach for gravity — some late-career meditation on mortality, wrapped in a title that sounds like it belongs on a headstone. Deep Purple, characteristically, have gone the other way. The title is a joke. The record underneath it is not.
Ian Gillan has described the concept behind Splat! as the end of humanity reimagined not as apocalypse but as transformation — a dissolving into something beyond the physical rather than a bang or a whimper. It’s a heavier idea than the title lets on, and it’s typical of this band that they’d bury it under a word you’d associate with a cartoon anvil. That tension — serious idea, playful packaging — is more or less the engine of the whole record.
Musically, this is the sound of a band that has found its footing again. Simon McBride, in his second album since replacing Steve Morse, has settled into the chair in a way that removes any lingering sense of a transition period. He’s not trying to be Ritchie Blackmore, and he’s not trying to be Morse either — he plays with a bluesier, more fluid attack that suits producer Bob Ezrin’s cleaner, more modern mix. Where the last album, =1, felt like a band cautiously reintroducing a new guitarist, Splat! feels like a band that has decided McBride belongs and can stop being careful about it.
The real story of this record, though, might be Don Airey. His Hammond and clavinet work throughout sits right at the center of these songs, trading lines with McBride in a way that recalls the interplay Jon Lord and Blackmore built the band’s reputation on in the first place. It’s not nostalgia exactly — it’s more that the band has rediscovered a specific chemistry: two virtuoso instrumentalists pushing each other, with Roger Glover and Ian Paice holding the foundation steady enough to let them do it.
As someone who spends his weekends trying to lock into a groove with three other people in a covers band, what strikes me most about Splat! is how unhurried it sounds. Nothing here oversells itself. The songs are compact — most under four minutes — but they don’t feel rushed, and they don’t feel like a band chasing a younger audience’s attention span either. They feel like a band that has simply gotten efficient at being themselves. Gillan, at eighty, has inevitably lost some top-end range, but what’s left is used shrewdly rather than strained against. The wit is intact. So is the timing.
None of this means Splat! reinvents Deep Purple, and it shouldn’t. What it does is something harder than reinvention: it takes a band whose defining songs were written more than fifty years ago and gives them a genuinely vital new chapter, rather than a victory-lap retread of “Smoke on the Water.” Gillan himself has said the record revisits the “fun” of the band’s 1969–73 material, and that’s the right word for it. Not an imitation of that era — a return to the spirit that made it work: two brilliant musicians in dialogue, a rhythm section that trusts them enough to stay out of the way, and a frontman still sharp enough to know exactly how much voice he has left and use every bit of it well.
Bands this far into a career rarely get to make an album that feels essential rather than dutiful. Splat! does. It won’t convert anyone who wasn’t already listening, but for those of us who never stopped, it’s a genuine reminder of why we didn’t.
David Cohen is an English solicitor and Israeli lawyer practising in cross-border technology transactions. He is also a gigging musician with his band The Core.
Leave a Reply