Future Shock

Ian Gillan’s eponymous act tends to get lost in the shuffle between his groundbreaking run with Deep Purple Mk II and Born Again, his misunderstood one-off with Black Sabbath. There’s a reason: look at what bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Ozzy Osbourne’s solo act accomplished at the same time. Still, as far as Deeper Purple releases go, Future Shock stacks up very favorably against Whitesnake’s rote blues revivalism and (post-Dio) Rainbow’s AOR glop. A lot of the charm comes from the way Bernie Torme’s guitar and Colin Towns’s keys battle for supremacy, pushing the songs back-and-forth between old-school heavy rock and flashier NWOBHM guitar fireworks on highlights like the title track and “(The Ballad of) The Lucitania Express.” Gillan does some wild stuff with his voicebox – he scats and spits and proto-raps through the title-defying “No Laughing in Heaven” like a choir of biblically-accurate angels. It’s a band throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and, like the pulp sci-fi paintings in the gatefold book, they make some strange patterns. They never quite hit these heights before or after, and in a little over a year everyone would be out, but for a brief and shining moment Gillan shocked the system.