CAMEMBERT ELECTRIQUE

This is GONG's second album and my first real meeting with one of their albums. I had only been listening to Shamal once before I gave this album the customary ten spins before I starting to write these lines.

I get the feeling that I am faaaaar out of my dept and comfort zone during my first listening sessions. Some of the music here is difficult to take in. But I soon found You Can't Kill Me very infectious and that cracked this album for me. This is a totally off the wall track and spaced out to the outer space. I am only drinking Pepsi Max and taking hayfever pills so there may be something I am missing here. LSD ? I do not know because this is far out stuff. The vocals and the saxophone is totally spaced out and creates an ambience of...... well, mental hospitals, in my mind. It is obvious that GONG is a very experimental band and they pushes the envelope on this album. Really pushes it. I arrived mentally prepared and I am not that shocked. Most of the music is dysfunctional and non-conformist somewhere between naive pop, Sid Barret's PINK FLOYD and jazz. In hindsight, bearing in mind this was 1974, a lot of the music here reminds me about the naivity of punk. Where SOFT MACHINE is much more controlled, GONG is just total freak-out anarchy on this album.

Then again, this album have a track like And You Tried So Hard. This is a song THE BEATLES could had done at their Sgt Peppers album and it would not had been out of place there. It is an excellent pop tune. The album ends with an avant-garde jazz work out called Tropical Fish. This is a strange, but still a good song.

This album is to a certain degree alien to a structured symphonic prog fan like myself. I like order. I fear anarchy. But I gladly admit this is an album I find very interesting. But I guess I need more time to really get into GONG. Or maybe I will never get into this band. It is a bit of an oddity, this band.

3 stars