The opening track, Krautrock, is a glorious 10-minute instrumental falling somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Hawkwind. And that’s perhaps no surprise, since the German term for this genre, depsite the title, isn’t “krautrock” (which has a bit of an air of English pejorative about it) but “kosmische rock”, i.e. “space rock”, the genre of Hawkwind.
Krautrock, the track, begins with a pulsing synth beat over swirling spacy wind noises and faint guitar solos, before about halfway through the drums kick in. Like Hawkwind, it’s very trippy and hypnotic and I loved it.
The music then abruptly changes to Sad Skinhead, a brief ska-like track that’s a kind of dark love song - “apart from all the bad times you gave me, I always felt good with you” and starts with a primal scream. Just A Second is another trancy instrumental but with a bit more of a sound-collage towards the end, Just A Second starts out with vocals that bounce up and down the scales, matched with some Emerson, Lake And Palmer keyboards, while the final track It’s A Bit Of A Pain seems to blend the two halves of Velvet Underground – fuzzy guitar appears over the top of a Candy Says sounding gentle track.
But despite this wild variety, the changes aren’t annoying, rather they enhance the overall sense of the music and and add an air of otherworldly weirdness to it. I really liked this one.
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