Perfect Strangers of Finland will be hosting a Whoosh pre-release listening party tomorrow, August 4, 2020, at The Riff in Helsinki. The album will be played twice in its entirety, first round starting at 18:00 local time. Caveat: the actual listening is still contingent on the mailman delivering the album in time 😉

What: Whoosh listening party
When: Tuesday, August 4, 2020, 18:00
Where: The Riff, Iso Roobertinkatu 3-5, 00150 Helsinki, Finland
Age limit: 18+

Thanks to Jari Kaikkonen for the info.

There is a tribute album to Deep Purple out in Brazil. The shtick is that all the covers are done by metal bands with female vocalists. And apparently Brazil has quite a few of them. Some of these can be rather interesting, as long as you don’t expect faithful reproductions of the originals.

Revengin – a very Tarja-esque version of Knocking at Your Back Door:

Sacrificed – Fireball:

Rizzi – Stormbringer (premieres Aug 2, 2020):

Sleepwalker Sun – Burn:

Duo Arcanum – The Gypsy:

Volkana – Highway Star

The Knickers – Hush

Pleiades – Woman from Tokyo

Final Disaster – Black Night

Dixie Heaven – Ted the Mechanic, a song that rarely gets a cover treatment

Thanks to Mike Whiteley for the heads up.

Several Whoosh reviews from around the web, and they are all very, very positive.

Get Ready to Rock:

There’s no dip in quality; in fact just when you think there should be, track 9, three belters appears. Storming. The band do not sound like they are going to quit any time soon. Only actual physical death, or serious arthritis, is going to stop these guys. No pressure, no expectations, just album of the year so far. Between producer Ezrin and label Ear Music, Deep Purple are in a good place right now. Let’s hope it stays like that. *****

Sonic Perspectives:

When I say they ALMOST completely forgot about their rearview mirror, it’s because their history is too rich to be ignored. “Whoosh!” is undeniably a Deep Purple album, and carries all the elements that made them a force to be reckoned with in the classic rock arena. The title and cover artwork harkens back to the previous release “Infinite”, where the end of the road seemed to be fast approaching. Instead, this new entry in their discography effortlessly scrapes any doubts about their ability to deliver and promises to take the listener into outer space. This may look like an unattainable goal for a band whose members are well into their 70’s, but they reach it with unparalleled flair and ease.

Markus’ Heavy Music Blog

‘Now What?!’ and ‘InFinite’ are for sure great longplayers but in retrospective it feels like they paved the ground for ‘Whoosh!’. Deep Purple’s newest album contains all you can ask for. It’s the typical Deep Purple sound signature providing consistency on which variety shines. These five guys still know how to Rock and it seems they still have a lot of fun in writing and recording stellar Rock music.

9 stars out of 10

Roppongi Rocks

“Whoosh!” is a solid album of grown-up bluesy rock but with some nuanced twists and turns.

BraveWords:

No worries, this is a standard Purple release with just a few new wrinkles about it that bring an up to date sense of relevance you will not be able to deny, especially how the lyrics reflect a real-time presence. They manage to wrap their classic sound around current affairs and turn down the wattage for what is a super digestible outcome. Make no mistake this is Deep Purple, but with perhaps a side of something they have not explored enough in the past.

Sentinel Daily:

If this is the swansong then it’s a very good one…

The funky hard rock of Drop The Weapon (which with it’s little Dancing In The Streets quote from keyboarder Don Airey hints at the playfulness of something like Mary Long from 1973’s Who Do We Think We Are) aside, you don’t get much of the ‘classic’ Deep Purple sound anymore. This, of course, shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise should you know anything about the band; singer Ian Gillan is now seventy four years old, and long past any suggestions that he should try and regain the glories of yore…

What is surprising is just how well Purple have repurposed their sound to face the challenges of septuagenerian rock n’roll; Whoosh!, their twenty-first full-length studio album and first since 2017’s Infinite, finds the band in musical repose, broadening their sound to take in, well, anything they feel like doing really.

Ultimate Guitar:

Reviewer’s score: 8 Superb
Users’ score: 5.3 (6 votes)

“Whoosh!” is a good album, perhaps not a future classic or anything, but it’s hard to really find too many glaring faults with it, since its songwriting and musicianship are fairly good, and the band is clearly not resting on its laurels, even more than half a century into their career. About the only negative thing I can say about the record is that it won’t particularly “wow” you if you’ve been following all of the band’s releases up to this point. But it’s still a good effort from a band that has been around practically forever and refuses to simply become a nostalgia act.

Thanks to Attila and Gary Poronovich for the info.

The late Derek Lawrence discusses his relationship with Tony Edwards and John Coletta in the early days of the band and why the band got signed to two different record companies at the time.
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Gotta Hear ’em All blog has a rather technical review of Nothing at All from the new album Whoosh. If you enjoy reading about E – D# – C# – B progressions and dominant tonic motions, you’ll enjoy this.

It goes something like this:

The key of the piece is predominantly E Major, with a short set of shifting keys during the instrumental solos. Steve Morse’s is hard to exactly figure, but my closest guess would be G Major with several accidentals. Don Airey’s, on the other hand, is pretty easy to peg as primarily D Major, helped along by Roger Glover’s consistent bass tone (and sadly, besides this solo, Glover is once again the least audible member of the group. My apologies to Mr. Glover that I say little about him…again).

Continue reading in Gotta Hear ’em All.

Thanks to Attila for the info.

Italian webzine Truemetal has a lengthy interview with Roger Glover, which was done by an obvious fan. That makes it twice as interesting for us as the usual fare from the mainstream press (even the musical mainstream press).

This album is the band’s twenty-first over more than 50 years of career. I guess this is a question you hear a lot, but where do you still find the inspiration after all this time?

[Laughs] That’s a good question, the best answer I can give you is something I thought when I was about eight years old.
When I was about eight, I lived in Wales, in a village, and every week we go to the market in the main town and there was a cinema there, and the cinema had big posters outside with the catchy titles of movies, and I actually did think, “What’s gonna happen when they’ll run out of movie titles?”.
Now, that’s a silly thing to think, that’s a typical eight years old thing to think, you can never run out of anything.
Things change and evolve, there are new ways of doing even the older things, that’s how mankind has been going on; we find new ways of doing the same things.

And the question that caused quite a stir in certain quarters recently:

I’ve seen the booklet of the album and noticed that Bruce Payne is not mentioned. He’s been your manager and Deep Purple’s manager for a long time, what happened with him?

We kind of reached an end to our productive years with a manager.
It’s very sad, Bruce is one of my best friends, we still talk, we’re still friends, but we felt the need to change and so we changed.
It doesn’t make any difference to the band, to the music of the band.

Read more in Truemetal. Seriously, it’s well worth your time.

Thanks to AndreA for the info.

Rock Candy magazine has Deep Purple as their cover story of issue 21 (August/September 2020). Inside is a feature promoting Whoosh that includes interviews with both Ian and Ian. Check out the opening spread (pdf).

Couple of quotes from Gillan:

The early days were fabulous. Everything was new and wonderful and shocking. Things got bigger and bigger and bigger, so we became very confident. But as young men, we were also wealthy. We had more money than we could ever imagine. In those circumstances, you can end up becoming surrounded by sycophants who tell you you can’t do a thing wrong. At that age I thought I knew everything. How wrong I was.

We never try to second-guess what the public wants, or what the business might desire from us in terms of the records we make. What we do is what pleases us, and we cross our fingers and put our hands together in prayer that the public will like it.

The issue of the magazine can be ordered directly from the publisher.

Thanks to BraveWords for the heads up and the quotes.

Paicey with the new installment of The Chief answers your questions on his DrumTribe channel.
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Paicey is unboxing the Whoosh box set. The album is due for release on August 7, finally!
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Graham Bonnet spoke to the Antihero Magazine, promoting a new Alcatrazz album — their first studio offering since 1986. The conversation also ventured into the Rainbow theme.

ANTIHERO: I read quite some time ago that you said hard rock music wasn’t something that came naturally to you as a vocalist.

Graham Bonnet: Yeah.

ANTIHERO: Here you are in 2020, 41 years after that Rainbow album that you released with them and you’re still doing it.

Graham Bonnet: I know. I’m stuck in that style of music. I never, ever thought I’d be in a band like Rainbow, which is basically Deep Purple-ish. Then I got a call and I was asked to come over to audition for the band. And I went over. I learnt the song called Mistreated. I didn’t know Rainbow from…I didn’t know who the hell they were, no idea, sounds like a punk group, Rainbow.

So anyway, I did the audition and they gave me the job basically that very day I went over and sang for them. I was very happy that it did happen because it changed my life completely. I had a new look at some different kind of music that I’d never played before, never dreamed of playing before. ] rock songs and stuff when I was a kid in my band because like you do when you’re a kid, you play in pubs and do other stuff. That’s what I was doing, so I knew what to do, I think. But I learned a lot from Roger and from everybody in that band because the musicianship was just incredible. I just stood back in amazement when they started to play this Mistreated song. It was just wow. The sound was just incredible and the keyboard player, Don, what an amazing player. Ritchie, say no more, Roger, fucking great bass player, and of course, Cozy Powell. That was the best band I’ve ever seen in rehearsal. At that time I was just blown away. So I had to take the job even though I thought I was wrong

I went back home to London. At that time, that’s where I was living. I had to say to my manager, “I’m not right for this, these guys have got long hair and Spandex and whatever, I look totally wrong. But they’ve given me the job, what do I do?” He said “You better do it because I think it would be good for you..” Because I found out later I lost a lot of fucking money from playing in that band. I didn’t see very much at all. When I spoke to Ronnie, he asked me if I was paid anything from Rainbow like at the end of the year. I said “No, I didn’t.” Sad”I was really ripped off ” I said I think that’s what happened to me. I don’t like telling tales out of school and all that, but it’s just very, very disappointing and one of the reasons I left the band. I just thought, hang on, something’s wrong here.

Read more in Antihero Magazine.

The new Alcatrazz record is called Born Innocent and is due out on July 31. Along with Graham, founding members Gary Shea and Jimmy Waldo are handling bass and keyboards respectively. Berklee college graduate and professor (“head of metal guitar” no less) Joe Stump is on guitar duties, with Mark Benquechea on drums rounding the lineup. There are also guest contributions to the album from Steve Vai, Chris Impellitari, and late Bob Kulick.

Thanks to Blabbermouth for the info.