Stray
Saturday Morning Picture
This is the first official re-release on vinyl under licensed courtesy of BMG Rights Management, UK, remastered from an original master copy out of the vaults of BMG. The album was originally released in 1972 on Transatlantic Records. 'Saturday Morning Pictures' was the band's third album and is guitar player Del Bromham's and Steve Gadd's favorite album to this day. It is a great album with songcraft better than most, and with a more 'matured', embellished and varied style compared to the previous two albums. Stray made greater use of keyboards, including a VCS3 synth, as well as guest musicians on extra percussion and a sparingly-used violinist. Certainly they'd stepped more in a progressive direction, without discarding hooky, well-crafted songs, but there was less this time around to give full psycho-rock satisfaction. The band moved toward mellower songs but nevertheless it was still a hard rocking effort with a lot of distorting guitars and psychedelic influences. According to lead guitarists and main composer Del Bronham by the time Stray made 'Saturday Morning Pictures' they felt they really wanted to experiment with recording techniques and multi instrumentation (this was something Del always admired George Martin and The Beatles for). 'Saturday Morning Pictures' opened up the band's sound, due in part to the maturity of their song writing (check out 'After The Storm' or the instrumental passage in 'Queen Of The Sea') but also due to the production by the legendary Martin Birch, who was moving into production after making his mark engineering for bands like Deep Purple and of course later made his mark with Iron Maiden. This was a step up in sound and quality and it was due to the band's building success. Further highlights are the band compositions 'Our Song' and 'Mr. Hobo', a country blues lament. It should also be noted that Mike Evan from the Bristol band Stackridge played violin and Andy Bearne contibuted harmonica. Transatlantic hired the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park to promote the album, with Stray performing a Saturday morning matinee gig at the venue. The album comes with 4-sided cover-sized insert with band story, photos etc. It is remastered and brilliant sounding. For all lovers of melodic, psychedelic hard rock!