ELOY

ELOY's debut album is one of Germany's 70's heavy weights and one of my personal favs. This stonker of an album captures the wonderful underground 70's krautrock magic, clearly standing up though as a very different sounding ELOY than subsequent album would prove for sure. Like so many great 70's German prog recordings, ELOY's debut album was produced by... yes you guessed it Conrad Plank. The overall sound is dark and deep with a heavy focus on electric guitar and percussion. From this albums original lineup, 3 of the 5 would stay behind to work on subsequent albums and retain the core of ELOY... Frank Bornemann (guitar, harmonica, percussion), Manfred Wieczorke (guitar, bass, vocals) and Wolfgang Stöcker (bass) with Erich Schriever (lead vocals, keyboards) and Helmuth Draht (drums) exiting after recording this masterpiece. Lead vocalist Erich Schriever has actually a great tock voice and adds that extra rough sound which adorns this album. Songs are exploratory and full of great 70's instrumentation with loads of wild guitar solos and great percussive sounds. Their overall sounds is quite heavy and does not yet introduce the space sound ELOY became associated with but I put this album in a different category and think of it as ELOY MK2. I only wish ELOY had recorded a few more albums with this lineup... brilliant stuff!