VOL. III [AKA: SPIRALE MALAX]

Lard Free's third album reminds me of early jams by the likes of Tangerine Dream or Amon Duul II, but performed taking into account some 7 or 8 years of subsequent musical development on the prog and krautrock scenes. Yves Lanes' synthesiser work veers between Hawkwind-like starship instrument panel noises and Tangerine Dream-esque soundscapes, whilst Xavier Bauilleret's guitar is a stern, brooding monster that can come out to lay down some discipline on proceedings at any time. The band may have been French, but they'd clearly been paying a lot of attention to what the krautrock scene had been doing and here produce an album that deserves consideration among such peers.