01. Blue Apple 02. Rock Scene 03. Don’t Waste Your Time 04. Psalm 05. Everything’s Alright 06. Got To Find A Way 07. Reflections – Part 1 08. Reflections – Part 2 09. Left The Past Behind
A classic Krautrock album. First of all, this cover art rocks. Gift was formed in 1969, Germany, as a school band. The joke quickly becomes a Krautrock band. Blue Apple (1974) is the second and last effort from these guys. While the two first tracks are just fine rock pieces, Don't Waste Your Time is awesome. The vocal lines are cool, and the organ is amazing. I like the guitar intro riff, repeated sometimes during the track. The bass tune is cool. The drums are fine, but could be better. The great surprise is Psalm, the fourth track, and better than the previous one! This one, ranges between an acoustic atmospheric catchy song and a psychedelic rock, with awesome riffage. Everything's Alright is another good track, but too repetitive. I must admit that without the organ, this album would be uncatchy.
Go To Find A Way did a great work opening the Side 2. Awesome right from the intro, the mellotron, moog, organ and stuff are very well executed. This song features a great guitar solo, by the way. Reflections is half weak, half good. The first mellow part sounds dead, but the second part really captivate and shows the real strenght of the song. Left The Past Behind is the last track of the album, and the virtuocity of the members makes a very funny ending. A good addition for any Krautrock or oldschool British Hard Rock collector.
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.
01. Flying dancer (3:25) 02. The source Part I & Part II (7:12) 03. For all the clowns (11:01) 04. Prélude (1:04) 05. The mountain king Part I & II (13:20) 06. Dream queen (5:05) 07. Fool the fortune (1:19)
Holger Brandt / drums, percussion Henner Hering / keyboards, synthesizers Michael Hofmann / Moog, guitar, flute, vocals Günther Moll / lead guitar, vocals Stefan Wissnet / lead vocals, bass, acoustic guitar
Guest musicians: Meryl Creser / recitation
Nick Woodland / acoustic guitar
After the excellent Sunrise, Sahara will again suffer a line-up change, seeing Woodland leave (I suppose he went to Desertland), then drummer Rosekind followed, thus leaving the Subject Esq. survivors to only three (Hoffman, Wissnet, Pittwohn), with Gunther Moll (guitar) and drummer Holger Brandt (ex-Missing Link) to fill in. Little did the rest of the group know that the two newcomers would leave soon after (and despite!) the release of another excellent album. This album was released late 75 on the mother label Ariola, but came with a bizarre humoristic cartoon-esque B&W artwork, that doesn't fit the music at all. Rather important to the group's sound, Hoffman is not playing sax anymore, but he's on synths (including a Moog) and on guitars, while still fluting around, Wwhile pittwohn seems to have become the manager/producer.
After a dispensable average Flying Dancer, the group plunges into a Crimsonian atmosphere, especially in the riff opening and closing of the two-part The Source track, alternating between dark quiet passages and heavier sombre moments. This track segues without much interruption into the title track, which is just as moody as its predecessor.
Opening the flipside is a Herring piano Prélude, an intro to the remainder of the album, with the two-part Mountain King track, opening on up-tempo riff, soon joined by the flute and some Moog playing, but Herring's organ is much kinder to our ears. The middle section features a jazzy Rhodes and some brilliant electric guitar, the track coming to a stop before the Moog comes back to rekindle the flame and throw the group in a light improve and then a verse-chorus song structure, where the heavy guitar and gentle organ dominate. Dream Queen opens on 12-strings guitar arpeggios and flute, much like an early Genesis song ; but the vocals are bringing you back down to earth, because they're not quite as dream or fantasy-like. Even when the song is fully opened, the flute is taking the front stage, but sounding Tull-ian, now. The closing Fool The Fortune outro is another 12-string guitar arpeggio piece
While this album is again excellent, I personally find it not matching the preceding Sunrise album, but then again many will prefer Clowns and its more symphonic second side. In either case, both Sahara albums are very worthy and essential listening. Unfortunately the group did not record more albums once the two newcomers decided to leave this superb group.
01. Marie Celeste (7:37) 02. Circles (4:42) 03. Rainbow Rider (8:41) 04. Sunrise (27:12) - Part 1: a) Sunrise
b) The divinity of being
c) Perception (inc. Devil's tun
e) / d) Paramount confluence - Part II: a) Aspiration
b) Creativity
c) Realisation
Henner Hering / keyboards Michael Hofmann / woodwinds, Moog, Mellotron, vocals Alex Pittwohn / harmonica, tenor saxophone, vocals Harry Rosenkind / drums, tuned percussion Stefan Wissnet / lead vocals, bass
Nicholas Woodland / guitars
What a change an album makes! Having suffered the departure of keyboardist Stadler, but added an extra guitarist, Englishman Nick Woodland (from Gift), the group changed its name from the strange and unfitting Subject Esq to the more concise Sahara and whatever adventure this new name promised. But the best thing happening to the band is the arrival of ex-Out Of Focus keyboardist Hennes Herring on many different keyboards. Coming in a superb gatefold with a fiery artwork, the album was released on a small German label Pan (Ariola), but also was distributed on the UK on the Dawn label in early 74. Now a sextet, Sahara develops a varied prog sound, sometimes veering classical, sometimes jazz, and at others, bluesy
Starting wildly on ultra quick guitar riff, Marie Celeste (a boat) quickly drops the horns and brings on the church-like organ in a quieter movement, when a sax blows its soul out and the boat sails many different and turbulent musical weather changes. The weaker Circles, country-folk track that shouldn't have crossed the ocean with those indispensable GI stationed around the country, but it's more folk than country, but it sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the otherwise near-perfect album. The following Rainbow Rider is a moody track that delves into jazz, after a piano intro and a fast-paced verse, then giving us an excellent 8-minutes track, if you'll pardon the all-too-predictable repeated choir line at its end-section
If the first side is nowhere near perfection, the flipside with its side-long title track is one of the best multi-movement epic suites ever, certainly one of the most varied: from electronica to classical, but mostly their own typical rock music that has its own sound and cannot be easily pigeonholed to classic UK prog bands. This 27-minutes+ affair (!) is head-twisting, skull-numbing, mind-blowing, will-bending, nerve-wracking, hair-pulling, eye-tearing, ear-piercing, breath-taking, sinus-emptying, throat-clearing, mouth-watering , etc..; and that's just to mention what is does to your upper extremities. And the amazing feat is that the track gets better and better to reacj its apex around the end of these 27-mins+.
Definitely one of the best "trad-prog" (this means more or less symphonic, but there is so much more to it than that) album out of Germany along with the first Grobschnitt album, Herring's OOF heritage did bring the extra touch that the band needed to become excellent instead of merely good.
