So here's the second entry from He Who Must Not Be Named. I had personal interest in this, as this showed up on ebay from a dealer with a bunch of rare Krautrock rarities last year. I won a couple of the auctions (on items I already knew), but there were quite a few I never heard of. Some clearly were out of my interest area. This one's description was somewhat appealing, but who knows right? And then HWMNBN shows up with this one in virtual hand. Cool. On this title, he also provides some insights:
"What a cover!! some kind of unusually creepy everyman has a key that will unlock the mind... In terms of music, it's a very hard rock style with almost the polished british heavy metal sound from the late seventies (like granmax or americans legend from the fjords), not like the old rough krautrock sound from the early seventies. In fact at the start of track 1 I thought I heard influences from Led Zep's Song Remains the Same (the song that is, not the live album), although the minute the singer opens his voice the track does lose a lot of its allure. With titles like god, reality, you'd think this was a philosophical treatise exploring Kant, and maybe it is, I can't make out any of the lyrics. Oddly they switch between german and english. A very impressive, albeit rough, outing totally uncharacteristic of German bands."
Well he certainly has a point about the vocalist, as he comes across as a Teutonic Arthur Brown. You can almost here the translation "Feuer!".... "Hölle Feuer!". Of course we must correct our presumably European friend (he mentioned something about watching over the Holy Grail in Provence. I mean, I'm calling bullsh*t right there. But you know... maybe?). Obviously Granmax is from the great Midwest (Missouri), rather than England. But let's not be pedantic, but get down to the meaning of what he's saying. Yes, good old fashioned American hard rock is a very astute observation.
Not only is the album half German and half English, but some of it is recorded live and some in the studio. Talk about "cobbling something together" for a release. There was quite a few of these private semi-progressive "Deutschrock" albums from the early 80s, and Amuthon fit squarely in the middle. A little Anyone's Daughter, 1980s era Grobschnitt and Novalis, Wintauge, Profil, Grim Reaper, and, oh, about 100 more obscurities few have heard and even fewer care about. It's certainly good, and non offensive German rock musik. Worth a spin, but no need for a CD reissue as far as I'm concerned.
Priority: none
No comments:
Post a Comment