MY SOLID GROUND

My Solid Ground is a German heavy rock band that extends their rather simple compositions with some jamming and psychedellic features. It all sounds quite stoned, and with a little stretch of the imagination you could call this Krautrock, but it stands far apart from the mainly experimental acts in that scene.

One of the main problems with this release is that they lean too heavily on their influences, with riffs and grooves that are not just inspired but actually stolen from other bands (easy to spot Deep Purple in 'Dirty Yellow Mist' and Sabbath in 'That's You'). Where the borrowing isn't too obvious the band struggles to come up with good licks of their own. An exception would be 'The Executioner' which has a cool experimental vocal and nice epic mellotrons. The 25 minute long 'Flash' could have saved this album but everything is sloppy about it, the composition is poor, the jamming parts are cliche, the playing is flat and uninspired, the vocals are sub-standard and hardly in tune at times, the melodies are boring, and so on.

At its best moments this album sounds similar to what Eloy would deliver with their albums 'Inside' and 'Floating'. Only, Eloy did it 10 times better then this weak and forgettable heavy rock album. And the best bits are borrowed from other bands. Close to being a 1 star.