NOVALIS

Novalis come from my home town and my father, who was otherwise pretty ignorant about music, owned this probably due to their local hero status, so this was one of the first albums I discovered when I started to become interested in (prog) music at the age of 13 or so. I loved it at the time and still love it. The musicians may not be top notch (keyboard and guitars are fine, but the drummer struggles at times and the bass is solid but unremarkable and the voice is quite amateurish, although it fits the songs pretty well), the compositions may not be the most complex and innovative you can imagine. The big quality of this is the musicality, the inner logic of the compositions. There are quite some contrasts and tempo changes in the longer tracks, but all sounds organic; every turn makes intuitive sense, the melodies and harmonies work very well, the arrangements are tasteful, the soli have the right length and fit nicely with the remainders of the song. It's simply beautiful how the elements work together. Most of the time the music is instrumental. The two songs with lyrics (Es faerbte sich die Wiese gruen, Wer Schmetterlinge lachen hoert) are driven by beautiful romantic melodies, but also enriched by at times quite powerful rock instrumental parts. Impressionen is inspired by classical music and the most symphonic and keyboard oriented track.

The other two instrumentals, Sonnengeflecht and Dronsz, start a tradition of fairly short and straight but pleasant and atmospheric instrumentals of various moods that would run through all further recordings of Novalis until the very end. Actually, listening to these 40 years later, they have a quite timeless quality, and I think it's a pity that nobody tried to release a Novalis instrumental sampler when postrock was big - the energetic Sonnengeflecht could easily have appeared (with somewhat revised sounds) on a Tortoise album and the smooth, slowly intensifying Dronsz sounds now like Salarymen to me, except that Novalis was 20 years earlier. These songs are so friendly and unpretentious that I'd guess nobody would have considered them cutting edge but just good to listen to - still they are ahead of their time in a certain way.

Overall a very creative, fresh and pleasant album with just the right degree of complexity.