TIMOTHY LEARY & ASH RA TEMPEL: SEVEN UP

This is an interesting release among the discography of Ash Ra Temple, as it has quite large personnel creating the music, and among them is the famous LSD prophet Timothy Leary, who was named as the most dangerous man living by late mr. Richard Nixon, if I do not recall wrong. This is still more some sort of cameo appearance, and there's no risk of anybody turning into a pile of smoking cinder despite the presence of the person mentioned.

As a record I detected some kind of unbalance in its overall quality. In my opinion the group achieved their highest merits on their "Join Inn" record, where the celestial ambience and aggressive acid rock met in most perfect form. On this album the A-side consists from bluesy tunes merged with astral soundscapes, but this collage doesn't work most fluently in my opinion, as there doesn't seem to be a clear direction for the sonic journeys, and the music doesn't build up much tensions nor dramatic feelings. The B-side is more interesting, moving towards the heavenly cosmic realization via spacey sounds and beautiful guitar chord progressions. Still this stuff sounds more like a reprise of their previous ideas, and with the potential excuse for lacking innovation, sadly the quality of music doesn't either in my opinion reach the greatness of their previous releases.

Nevertheless "Seven Up" is surely a worthy for listening if you're interested of classic early krautrock or psychedelic movement as a phenomenon. If you like this, but the other releases of this band are not known to you, I would highly recommended to check out the other discs of this unique and great group of musicians. The album covers fit in my opinion pleasantly to the LP sides symbolizing "Space" and "Time", these two entwining as "space-time" of matter, maybe in the manner of the symbol on the cover.