Album Review: the Ventures- New Space

While streaming via both Spotify and Pandora, I kept running into a new single by the Ventures. 

I have to admit that I was a bit confused. “New” Ventures? I had to dig in. It was hard to find anything but here is what was easy to find. 

All the members of the most famous lineup of the Ventures were dead. Guitarist Don Wilson passed away in 2022. Bob Bogle, Nokia Edwards and drummer Mel Taylor all preceded him. This opens a conversation of whether a band can exist without its members. (Some of the names often cited in these conversations are acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, and Foriegner). 

So let’s look at the make up of the Ventures. The current lineup of the Ventures has evolved and been approved over the years. The current iteration of the Ventures is led by Bob Spalding and his son. Spalding has been active with the band in some capacity since 1980 (his relationship with Mel Taylor going back about a decade earlier before that) and the face of the band for the last 15 years. It helps that the Ventures seem to exist more as a concept than a personality led band like Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. 

The most recognizable member likely being Taylor, and Taylor’s legacy (he passed in 1996) is represented here by his son being the drummer. This may not please everyone. This may feel like Jack Osbourne and Tony Martin touring as Black Sabbath in 2023. 

There is also the argument that this album would go unnoticed under any other name (the only lengthy article I can find on this band is from a website called StormSurgeofReverb.com and they mention this band had been also advertised elsewhere as V2- presumably Ventures 2) Personally, I am surprised how much I love this new album “New Space”. 

It seriously feels if not like the actual Ventures, an updated take on what a 21st Century Ventures would sound like. There are of course, dozens of surf bands, but somehow this continuation seems to hit perfectly upon it. 

 The album opens with a cover of “Fly Me to The Moon” which has the same crunch as “Walk Don’t Run”. It’s an instrumental cover of the song made famous by Sinatra but given a sharp clean production that you hear on the Ventures most famous tune but all of the other greatest surf tunes (Pipeline, Wipeout, Miserlou, and so on) Smartly, though the album opens up to a set of originals that follow the early 1960s Space (and Surf) theme. It’s a really good record. 

 We are a good 20 years removed from where we seemingly used to worried about such things as credibility. It still comes to mind that we are aware that the Four Tops currently on tour are just a lineage of a band that no longer really exists; and I feel that we have been comfortable calling an album sans Entwistle and Moon a proper Who record. Do the Ventures feel like more of a band or do they feel like a sports team or a business? Are they to be treated like the Beatles or more like The New York Yankees or Sears Roebuck? The Byrds played in my old home town (population 20,000) in the 90s but it wasn’t a lineup that McGuinn, Crosby or Hillman could recognize. These were thoughts I wasn’t comfortable with at the time, but seem to be okay with now. And this group is bringing the Ventures sound back properly, so I guess that’s enough for me.