BETWEEN THE UNIVERSES

I've been aware of Tritonus for many years, since 2000 when their albums were reviewed on Tommy's Forest of Progressive Rock (later called Vintage Prog, no longer updated, but the site still exists), at the same time I understand why this band was never a high-priority band for me. This band was lead by Peter K. Seiler, and he's still very much musically active to this day. It's obvious that this band was modeled after the likes of ELP and Triumvirat, but Seiler often has a few tricks up his sleeves that neither Emerson nor Fritz would have never done. But the problem I have is a few parts of this album are unbearable to me. Parts of the title track and the "Suburban Day Suite", but there's some nice moments, but if they got rid of some of those cheesy parts, this could have been one of the great German prog bands. "Mars Detection" might not be to everyone's liking, it might sound like a bunch of synth doodling, but I love that strange synth pattern Seiler comes up with, and while he uses the typical Moog and Solina string synths here, he also uses a PPG module (I always associated PPG with Tangerine Dream, as they were starting to use PPG gear around this time). What I love of this piece is the spaciness, of the kind ELP or Triumvirat would have never thought of. It seems that Geff Harrison of Kin Ping Meh and 2066 & Then sings on some of the music, and since he was British, English would not be a problem for him. Tritonus had troubles with the English language, as did Frank Bornemann of Eloy, a perfect example going for "Sunday Waltz" off their debut where the song goes: "Sunday morning / at 8:30 / when the teewee is on" ("teewee" meaning "TV"), which ended up unintentionally hilarious. So at least that was less of a problem on Between the Universes thanks to Geff Harrison.

To me, not a high priority band, if you can get it on the cheap, then do so, but paying full price for an original LP might be a bit much (they don't come cheap). Three stars.