Love - Love Lost (1971) (2009)

The post-Forever Changes recordings that Love and Arthur Lee did in the late '60s and early '70s will forever be a point of contention among fans. Some contend that he and the group never neared the heights of the LPs by the pre-1968 lineups; others find the post-1967 discs to be high-quality hard rock. The material on Love Lost, a 14-track collection of previously unreleased music the band cut for Columbia in 1971, isn't likely to change many people's minds on these scores. Even judged on its own merits rather than against the earlier Love catalog, however, it's not something fated to be hailed as all that impressive, even if it does fill in an intriguing gap in their recording career. To begin with, it should be noted that while all of these tracks are previously unissued, some of the songs did emerge in different versions on Lee's 1972 solo album Vindicator and the 1975 Love long-player Reel to Real, with different versions of yet others appearing on an unreleased (but bootlegged) album done in the early '70s, Black Beauty. Love's brief association with Columbia thus found them using approaches similar to those found on the aforementioned records, more often than not wedding rather routine hard rock to Lee's sometimes (but not always) idiosyncratic lyrics and song structures. Yet as even Michael Simmons' excellent liner notes acknowledge, the Columbia sessions were on the loose and undisciplined side. These tracks don't find the late Love at their best, and could have used more finely honed songwriting and sharper playing.
All that noted, those who do enjoy Love from this era will find much of this to be not all that dissimilar from slightly previous Love albums like False Start and Out Here, though nothing here would have been considered highlights of those LPs. A Jimi Hendrix influence is certainly detectable on some songs, and not just the version of "Ezy Ryder" that concludes the CD. "Midnight Sun" could almost pass as a Hendrix outtake, in fact, and if "Product of the Times" and "Looking Glass" (with its "Machine Gun"-like riff) aren't quite as blatant, they aren't far behind in that regard. For those who like Lee's lighter side, "Everybody's Gotta Live" is far more tilted toward the brooding folk-rock with which he made his initial name, while "Good & Evil" has a most unusual lyric boasting of the singer's taste for Japanese, Spanish, and Native American women over white ones. The inclusion of four acoustic demos (only one of which, "Good & Evil," is also included in an electric version) also helps balance this collection, perhaps inadvertently illustrating how Lee's songs could often be more satisfying in a relatively folky bare-bones state.