ALPHA COLLECTION 1.

3.5 stars. ATTEMPT TO RESTORE was the project of Holger Schmidt the former singer and lead guitarist for TIGER B. SMITH. He owns his own recording studio called Woodland Studios and here he has attempted to restore that "sound" of Krautrock from the early seventies. This is dark and heavy at times with distorted guitar leads, organ, bass and drums in this four piece out of Germany. Interesting to me that the drummer here is Wolfgang Baade who was part of the short lived AUS DEM NICHTS which consisted of him and members of XHOL and EMBRYO. On my "Wiesbaden 1972" archival release from EMBRYO the bonus track called "Clockwork Blue" is done by AUS DEM NICHTS who opened for EMBRYO that night.

The music here reminds me mostly of GILA and THE COSMIC JOKERS but also it reminds me of the darker music done by AMON DUUL II and ASHRA TEMPEL. We get three long tracks ranging from 16 1/2 minutes to 21 1/2 minutes allowing for a lot of trippy jamming and improvizing. No vocals but we get some cool sounding samples that I feel aren't used very well on this album. The opener "The City" opens with traffic sounds so we hear cars, sirens, horns etc. and it's all good but the problem for me is that during this 16 1/2 minute song they just randomly it seems throw this sample in there while the music is playing so it comes across as being noise affecting my ability to hear the actual music. A siren will pop up once in a while too.

The same on "Breath" the longest track, we get these samples of German Shepherds on the chase after this guy that comes into the sound soon as we hear him running then breathing hard as he's being pursued. Again awesome but then this stuff just pops up out of nowhere throughout the song. Dogs barking or man running or breathing hard but not sequenced just one of the three here and there. I listen too closely to my music maybe but it bugs me that two great samples just get overused and used at inappropriate times. Again the music itself is very good and 4 star material although it would have also been cool to make it 40 to 45 minutes like vinyl instead of an hour. But this was 1993 and 20 years after Krautrock's golden age. And we all know if it's not Krautrock it's Krapp. So check it out!