01 - One of These Days
02 - Here They Come
03 - I'd Love to Change the World
04 - Over the Hill
05 - Hard Monkeys
Boy that boy could play. I mean I know he’s still out there and he probably still can. I haven’t heard him lately. But Alvin Lee in 1971 on A Space In Time — however uneven the album is — was the equal or better of any of his contemporaries. Page, Clapton, Townshend, any of that magnificent array of British rock guitarists of the era. He was also admirable for writing in the electric blues form of American artists of the 50s: Muddy, Howlin Wolf, John Lee. He didn’t just borrow it like most British and American rockers of the time, he got right down into it. Listen to the lead track “One of These Days” and tell me it wouldn’t be fine done by the Billy Boy Arnold Band.
The problem is the album moves off into a variety of stuff. There’s a sort of Traffic sounding angst poetry song and there are little pointless electronic effects that seem quaint now but were probably meant to be psychedlic, and maybe even a touch of the Kinks on “Over the Hill” (more about this tune later). “Who is (or was) this guy?” I found myself saying.
Depending upon your level of generosity, Alvin and the band were broadening their musical style, trying to finally get a hit record, or leaving the blues for pop. Many thought that “progression” depressed Alvin but didn’t he have the industry muscle to stop it? Ten Years After did get their one giant hit record off this album, by the way — the hippie (I guess) anthem “I’d Love to Change the World.” Last I knew, the track was still getting FM “Classic Rock” play. I for one won’t patronize the song with Lee’s rippling, screaming guitar work wonderfully underlaid by Ric Lee’s ferocious drumming. From: https://irom.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/cd-reviewrock-ten-years-after-a-space-in-time-remastered/
Despite all the hype, Ten Years After could never have earned the title of a "prog-rock" band: sometimes they are mistakenly lumped in with the movement, but Alvin and Co.'s ambitions never really amounted that high - for the most part, they were just hardcore blues rockers with a slight experimental edge, to distinguish them from colleagues like early Fleetwood Mac or Free. Still, if there ever was a period in which they were real close to embodying some "progressive" tendencies, it was this fall of 1971, with this extremely strange, un-Ten Years After-like album, and this really great bunch of songs, with hardly a major stinker in among all the melodies. Unarguably the band's strongest and most consistent effort since the Ssssh days, A Space In Time continues the line of Watt in its heavy use of synthesizers and special effects, but this time the members probably took out some time to make these thingamajigs actually work. Alvin's guitar is not idle either; and his songwriting reached a peak at this time - never to be surpassed again.
One thing strikes you immediately as you let all the tracks flow through your mind, one by one - where's the fingerflashing? This sounds nothing like what we've grown to expect from the band because the main trademark element of the sound, Alvin's blazing speedy chops, are completely missing. An intentional move, of course; whereas I wouldn't want to accuse Alvin of sharing the famous "guitar hero complex" that managed to overtake such six-string greats as Clapton and Jeff Beck in the early Seventies, it's at least clear that on A Space In Time the man was keen on cutting out the crap and fully concentrating on the melodies and real musical substance. He wanted to be able to finally make a record that would feature him as a real solid composer, that would not just keep repeating the same lightning-speed licks over and over again. And while it's rather hard to believe without having heard the record, he did succeed. On here, you'll find the best batch of melodies ever created by the band - many of them acoustic, showing Alvin's developing passion for the unplugged atmosphere, but some electric as well. Alvin's lyrics rarely match the melodies in skillfulness or deepness, but as usual, he manages to walk the thin line between cliches/banality and pretentiousness just fine. And while his take on the 'we gotta get out of this place' schtick on 'I'd Love To Change The World' is nothing particularly special, it comes along as sincere and never too overblown. From: https://starlingdb.org/music/tenyears.htm#space
