Gift - 1972 - Gift

Gift
1972
Gift

01. Drugs
02. You’ll Never Be Accepted
03. Groupie
04. Time Machine
05. Game Of Skill
06. Don’t Hurry
07. Your Life
08. Bad Vibrations

- Uwe Patzke / bass, vocals
- Rainer Baur / guitar
- Helmut Treichel / vocals
- Hermann Lange / drums, percussion

German act GIFT started out as a school band back in 1969, initially under the moniker Phallus Dei, with an initial line-up consisting of Rainer Baur (guitar), Hermann Lange (drums), Uwe Patzke (bass), Helmut Treichel (vocal) and Nick Woodland (guitar).

By 1972 Woodland had left to join Subject Esq., while the rest of the band hit the studio to record their first album, and in 1973 their self-titled debut Gift was issued. On this production the band was pretty much cemented in a heavy rock sound typical of this day and age; with plain, hard guitar riffs served aplenty.

One year later their sophomore effort Blue Apple surfaced. By now Treichel had also said his goodbyes to the band, while Dieter Frei (keyboards, moog, mellotron, vocals) and Dieter Atterer (guitars, vocals) had joined the outfit. For this second creation the band's musical explorations took on freakier and more elaborate movements, to the extent that this venture is regarded as belonging to the rooster of albums deemed interesting for followers of the Krautrock scene.

Their self titled debut album is comprised eight songs with no flutes, no woodwinds and no keyboards, just plain hard guitar riffs, to be compared to Hairy Chapter. Thick, acidic guitars, hard charging riffs. “Game Of Skill”, “Drugs” and especially “Bad Vibrations” all feature great, aggressive feels and sounds.

As Phallus Dei they reputedly recorded an album, which was never released, and afterwards the band changed its name to Gift and secured a deal with the Telefunken label, but at the time Woodland had already departed and joined Sahara, although his name appeared in the original vinyl version of the first album.                           Recorded at the Union Studios in Munich, Gift's self-titled debut was released in 1972.

Obviously influenced by the British Hard Rock bands of the time, Gift played a powerful Hard Rock with strong progressive flourishes and lots of jamming parts in the Kraut Rock tradition of many German Hard/Psych Rock acts, despite their tracks being actually rather short. The music is very energetic and edgy all the way with a pounding rhythm section and numerous impressive guitar leads, while Treichel proved to be an excellent singer with his quite British-accented voice. While the negative point of the album tends to be the similarity between the pieces of the album, the combination between these angular Hard Rock riffs with the inventive grooves and the typical Kraut-styled middle-part jams is mostly working well. Expressive vocals with good choruses, fiery solos and a good dose of changing tempos result a bunch of dynamic and adventurous compositions. Often the album retains a grandiose, emphatic and haunting atmosphere, based on Baur's classy guitar exercises, while a couple of tracks feature some good flute parts of unknown origin.

GIFT's debut is an excellent display of no nonsense hard rock with a brilliant juxtaposition of cleverly crafted compositions that feature strong melodic hard rock hooks with heavy guitar riffs and an excellent rhythm section that features hairpin turn time signature changes and unexpected twists and turns in the musical flow without sacrificing the underpinning of what makes a hard rock song work so well. The Krautrock scene was filled with heavier bands but not all of them could pull it off but GIFT did so with seeming ease with a particularly strong emphasis on the drumming and percussive accoutrements that give the album that extra special something. Add to that the strong confident vocal ability of Helmut Treichel and it's easy to declare GIFT's debut release as one of the most competent heavy psych releases of the early 70s.

Perhaps not quite as heavy as contemporaries such as Lucifer's Friend, GIFT certainly took the established heavy psych sounds of the late 60s to their limits before the scene moved on to the hard rock and heavy metal that would soon become the more popular style of the 1970s. While compared to the fellow German band Hairy Chapter, GIFT was similar to many other bands such as Captain Beyond and Twenty Sixty Six and Then but due to the talented members on board managed to stand out as an original all its own without deviating significantly from the established heavy psych sounds of the era. This one doesn't seem to get as much love as the more psychedelic Kraut bands of the era and gets lost behind the harder bands from England and the USA but for my tastes GIFT successfully cranked out a wild ruckus of an album for their debut. The band would change its sound by adding keyboard sounds for its sophomore album "Blue Apple" but for this first offering GIFT was a powerful beast of heavy guitar driven rock music.