Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Lights Out, revel in the sound that the darkness brings to your door and the senses, for there is a renewal of friendship and love ready to explode in your heart as UFO release the latest reaffirmation of metal history as their back catalogue receives the 180 gram and extended offering to a new generation of listeners and appeases those who have kept a lit vigil of their prowess from the start.

Lights Out sees the celebrated band break ground with the inclusion of Paul Raymond on keyboards, replacing Danny Peyronel, but also stretch the definition of the genre by the use of horn and string arrangements at the capable hands of Alan McMillan, this was perhaps a step that might have divided opinion on first listen in the mid-1970s, but with the benefit of hindsight is allocation of time in the studio that doesn’t just work, it is an effect that astounds, that gives the recording a pulsating attack of groove as well as a measure of timing that the audience wasn’t aware was missing from the previous recordings.

Hindsight is perhaps the point of the release, as well as celebration and re-introduction to the faithful, for in a sense of firsts, you also would be aware that the album was also marking its own time in the phenomenon himself, Michael Schenker, and his leaving the group due to various conditions that were arising.

To be able to hear the album with more clarity, in its natural state of the warmth of vinyl, and with the inclusion of the famous Roundhouse performance in 1977 placed within the packaging for good measure, is a joy. There may have been tensions, but without a taut wire occasionally acting as a guide then how do we ever involve passion to keep the groove and the growl in the minds of those we are attempting to influence.

The addition of the strings is that influence, and blends with Phil Mogg’s vocals in such a way that gives a extra bounce upon listening, and as tracks such as Too Hot To Handle, Just Another Suicide, Electric Phase, Love To Love, and the impressive album title track of Lights Out, as well as the tremendous live offering with tracks such as Doctor Doctor, This Kid’s, and the brutally cool Rock Bottom, that comes across is perhaps a culmination of albums that just drew blood from the ears and which were welcome, and indeed pleaded for at a period in British social history that was calling for change, for something more than the bland streak imposed by suits and squares alike.

Lights Out is more than an institution, one well founded in adaption and keenness to stretch the supposed limits of the genre, it is no wonder that UFO are always mentioned in dispatches of being a huge influence of hundreds of metal bands that came afterwards, and in this album that reasoning shows completely.

Ian D. Hall