BLITZKRIEG

I had never heard of this obscure german band until recently. I was curious about it and got their debut album called Blitzkrieg (in fact, their former moniker before they changed it when they realized there was already a british band with that name). They had a kind of international line up, something quite unsual for the early 70´s: Jürgen Dollase (keyboards) and Harald Großkopf (drums) were germans, but guitarrist Bill Barone was american and bassist Jerry Berkers, dutch. However, the leader of the show is Dollase, for he wrote all the music and lyrics. So if you like keyboard-dominated prog, this is a goo pick.

At first I didn´t like this CD a lot. And I still think that the opener, Lunatic, is not of my liking. It has too many early 70´s cliches for my taste. For that time I guess it was new and bold, but nowadays it just sounds repoetitive, chaotic and pointless. However, things go pretty much ok from then on. Nothing too groundbreaking mor original, but good anyway. Dollase is the main man here, but Barone has the chance to shine several times with some fiery guitar lines (quite psychedelic and bluesy), while the remaining members do also quite well. The music is a mix of symphonic prog and krautrock, with some more accessible stuff thrown in for good mesure (there are only four tracks and the two with vocals are quite melodic and simple).

If you´re looking for that typical prog sounds of the early 70´s you´ll probably like this CD very much. There are lots of piano and mellotron. Strangely there is no Hammond organ, something quite strange concerning prog bands in general and german bands in particular which seemed to have elected the organ as the main keyboard instrument, sometimes the only keyboard in the band (listen to early Jane and Eloy, just to mention two). I don´t know if the original production was that good or if this is a remastered version, but my Ohr CD has a very clean sound.

Rating: 3.5 stars.