JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EYE

Nektar, the band formed by four young Britons in 1969 in Hamburg, Germany, finally released their debut album "Journey to the Centre of the Eye" in 1971, after two years of touring the music circuit in the region. A work influenced by the psychedelic wave prevailing in those years and contemporary to the Floydian "Meddle" and the Crimsonian "Islands" among others, and which finds in the fantasy story of an astronaut's journey to Saturn, worried about the fate of the earth and intercepted by aliens, the perfect motif to build lysergic and dark sonorous atmospheres.

Although there are thirteen enunciative themes that compose it, "Journey to the Centre of the Eye" is in reality a huge single suite that beyond the wandering and abstract lucubrations of the experimental "Prelude" and "Warp Oversight", it flows solvently, using the experimental "Prelude" and "Warp Oversight", it flows solvently through Allan Freeman's intriguing keyboards and melotrons shared with Derek Moore, the latter also responsible for an extremely deep bass, interacting with Roye Albrighton's distortion and effects-laden guitar riffs as in the rising instrumental intensity of "Countenance"; as well as in solidly structured sections such as the hopeless and dramatic "Astronauts Nightmare", the two parts of the sinuous "The Dream Nebula", the anguished "Burn Out my Eyes" or the dense and conclusive "Death of the Mind" overflown by the intensity of the omnipresent melotron, pieces that also count on the megaphonic and stunned singing of Albrighton in cosmic mode and the determined drums of Ron Howden.

"Journey to the Centre of the Eye", despite its rudimentary production work, is an excellent debut album that did not achieve all the repercussion and recognition it deserved, partly because of Nektar's geographical distance from the epicentre of the movement and partly because of the proliferation of excellent bands of the genre that made it difficult to gain a place in the general consideration of the time.

4 stars