This is something of a family album, co-credited to
Paul Kantner and his wife,
Grace Slick, and featuring on its cover a photograph of their infant daughter, China. It also features the family of San Francisco Bay Area musicians, including
David Crosby,
Graham Nash,
Jerry Garcia of
the Grateful Dead, and other current members of
Jefferson Airplane and future members of
Jefferson Starship. Its style of loosely arranged acid rock music and radical left political lyrics is similar to such recent albums as the
Kantner/
Starship Blows Against the Empire (December 1970) and
the Airplane's
Bark (August 1971), which were made by most of the same players. But
Kantner and
Slick's usual stridency is not counterbalanced by substance as much as on earlier efforts, perhaps because they were making too many albums too quickly to keep up the quality of their songwriting. Still, anyone who enjoys the sweet-and-sour unison singing of
X's
John Doe and
Exene Cervenka should listen to
Sunfighter to see where they got it from. ~ William Ruhlmann