Water into Wine Band - Hill Climbing For Beginners - Myrrh label original

	£		25
	$		33

Water into Wine Band - Hill Climbing For Beginners
Label - Myrrh Catalogue number - MYR1004 Country of issue - UK Year of Issue - 1974
Sleeve - Textured and EX Spine is undamaged Lyric insert is a little creased but no rips or damage Record is play graded at VG+ (odd pop and crackle) 
One of the few UK Xian albums of the era that are worth the asking price. A splendid combination of psychedelic folk and mellow progressive rock





Info on the artist (From Prog Archives)

Water Into Wine Band biography
WATER INTO WINE were a seventies British band known for their acid folk music and overtly Christian lyrics. The band is generally considered part of the loosely-formed 'Jesus Movement' of musicians who proselytized through popular music. Contemporaries included CAEDMON and MALCOM AND ALWYN in the UK, and groups such as PETRA and CHILDREN OF THE DAY in the United States.

The band was formed while the four members were students at Cambridge University in 1971, and became a full-time venture in 1974. The band's first album 'Hill Climbing for Beginners' was released in the UK that year, but Myrrh (a Love Records label) was concerned the music would not be well-received by fundamentalists in the U.S. so remixed the album before releasing it the following year. The band went on to produce a second album, but by then the Jesus movement had already largely faded amid both scandals and changing lifestyles. The band released 'Harvest Time' as a small-run private pressing in 1976, shortly before the group disbanded. Most of the members left the music business, but multi-instrumentalist William Thorp went on to play violin for the Welsh National Opera and later the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. 

WATER INTO WINE BAND is regularly mentioned even today as a seminal gospel beat band of that era, and their songs often appear in Christian music compilations and on alternative and Christian radio. 

 Here's an interesting album with unfortunately too little information available to help fully explain it. The band gets mentioned quite a bit even today as an influence by many Christian musicians, but some of that may be just pretention since the band and this album are pretty obscure, and weren't even very well known when they were active a quarter-century ago.

Water into Wine Band have been connected to the so-called hippy 'Jesus Movement' of the Woodstock era. Overtly Christian themes lyrics like "this box of wood I'm playing 'though I call it my guitar, will not come with me when I'm gone" and "I've done my share of sinning lord, yeah I've laughed and though of you - but now I'm ready for You" bear testament to that (pun partially intended). But if you can get past the sometimes overbearing self-flagellation, this is a pretty decent folk album with some very creative variations despite being a mostly acoustic and mellow recording.

The band apparently first recorded these tracks in England for a UK release, but following the band members' graduations from Cambridge they undertook a brief tour of the U.S. and another, more water-down version was released there. My Radioactive reissue is a bit of a disappointment since there are virtually no liner notes save for album credits printed in an unreadable 4 or 5 point font. The Kissing Spell release is said to be a double-disk CD with copies of both the UK and U.S. versions of the album, along with a booklet containing pictures and extensive biography notes. I haven't managed to find a copy of that one yet.

The opening track "Stranger in the World" sounds like a St Peter-inspired 'just waiting for the rapture' tune that features mostly acoustic guitar and a little bit of violin. Not an auspicious beginning, but things do pick up after this one. "I Used to be Blind" features a stunning violin solo that raised the hair on the back of my neck the first time I heard it, and it immediately found its way onto one of my many violin compilation CDs.

"Jesus I've Been Walking" is a come-to-Jesus lament whose lyrics fit into that overbearing category, but the guitar and percussion rhythm is quite good, while the vocals and mood remind me quite a bit of another dirty-sinner Jesus group, Wovenhand. This track also has some outstanding a haunting violin work.

The title track is set to bongos and piano in an easy lumber with almost whispered vocals that I can't really be bothered to try and make sense of. The piano makes this one work despite the garbled vocals, and the bongos set the context squarely in the early seventies.

The next couple of tracks are weaker in my opinion, more piano and some violin but mostly more vocal moaning about the bitterness and toil of The Struggle. "Start of a Run" has some nice vocal harmonies, and "Song of the Cross" is another Wovenhand-like slow number that mostly centers around acoustic guitar picking and violin. This is the longest track on the album and has some mildly interesting tempo changes, but there's only so much you can do with acoustic guitar and bongos so in the end the song comes off as a bit too long and self-indulgent for my tastes.

The Radioactive version ends too soon with a mildly psych electric guitar-led "I Have Seen the Lord", too soon I say because other versions of this album include a longer version of the title track that I've heard and prefer to the one presented here.

The band would record another album ('Harvest Time') before fading away along with most of their Jesus freak brethren in the mid-seventies, but I have to admit their legacy is one of enthusiastic and original music that sounds more sincere than much of Christian popular music today. So for that (and for the exceptional violin work) I'm going to go with four stars for this odd piece of music history. Good luck finding it, but if you do I'd recommend it if you are a prog folk fan or someone who collects religious music but are turned off by the overbearing and polished stuff being passed off under that guise these days. And if anyone comes across the UK version please post a review as I'm really curious to hear about what the record company felt was too rough for American ears.

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8. Trades are always possible if item doesn't sell. My main areas of interest are UK folk, folk-rock, traditional artists and singer songwriters