FIRST

Tripped out psychedelic blues/rock which can be compared to everything from Chuck Berry on quailudes to some early Earth/Black Sabbath. Recorded over a period of 25 hours by top-flight German recording engineer Connie Plank at Star recording studios in Hamburg in June '71, this one off album from Dies Irae ( Day Of Wrath ) achieved some notoriety at the time of it's release because many radio stations refused to play it because of dabblings in the occult even though the drugged out vocals ( sung in English ) were barely comprehensible through the narcotic haze which prevades over most of the album.

Although there are a few tracks ( Lucifer, Another Room, Armagedon Dragonlove ) that get into some groovin' blues/rock riffing there's just too much LSD in these concoctions especially the drugged out vocals to take too seriously. Tired picks up the pace somewhat followed by Witches Meeting which gets into some freaky guitar effects but too much time is wasted on a couple of directionless bass and drum solos here. Red Lebanese Parts 1&2 ( another drug of choice? ) continues on with a bit more structure and more freaky guitar and gets into a jazzier blues slant with Red Lebanese Part 2 briefly becoming more melodic with some acoustic thrown into the mixture along with some toned down electric guitar then returning to the original blues riff. The strangest track on the record and the one which perhaps holds the most curiousity is simply titled Trip. Basically a sound experiment, again with various guitar treatments that was also made into a surreal short 8mm film, a visual presentation of an LSD trip that was even shown on German TV!

Unfortunately the creative potential of these far out blues, rock and elecronic studio experiments are not fully realized because every groove they hit is just not exploited to the max. There are certainly some really cool moments in this mindtrip from these blues hippies, mostly thanks to Plank's studio wizardry, but Die Israe's First will hold more appeal for followers of '60s head counter-culture than it will for the uninitiated. The band was reformed briefly in the early '90s and three live tracks from First ( Lucifer, Another Room and Trip) appear on a 1991 album, Saarlive, recorded in their hometown of Saarbrucken, Germany which are by far superior and more mature than the versions presented here.