ROCKPOMMEL'S LAND

Only five years after their homonymous debut album and against the backdrop of a moment in which the great icons of symphonic rock were struggling to maintain their threatened leading positions in the face of the rudimentary and ferocious punk attacks and the accessible rhythms of colorful disco pop, Grobschnitt confronts this negative inertia for the genre with the surprising and conceptual "Rockpommel's Land" (1977), a work of great maturity and exquisite musical sense, and the fifth of their discography.

The fanciful journey of the young Ernie riding on a kind of bird called Maraboo imaginary flying over cities inhabited by hostile stone men until reaching the liberating Rockpommel's Land, serves as a stage for an aseptic musical display divided into four sections from the atmospheric and relaxed synthesizers of Volker Kahrs and the luminous and delicate acoustic arpeggios of the duo Stefan Danielak and Gerd-Otto Kühn in "Ernie's Reise", a beautiful introduction that draws on the sound waves of its Yes referents, continues to flow with the more agitated and changing "Severity Town" marked by Danielak's histrionic voice at the helm and some urban sound effects in between, and with the melancholic and brief "Anywhere" that Kühn adorns with a meaningful guitar solo in its epilogue.

And the journey of the restless Ernie concludes in the extensive "Rockpommel's Land", another relaxed symphonic demonstration that again draws inspiration from Yes and partly from Genesis, but to which Grobschnitt puts his own stamp, intertwining it with the vocal roughness of Danielak, some children's choirs, and ending in a pompous and emotional orchestrated passage to bring the adventure to a close.

In spite of its scarce distribution and little diffusion work, "Rockpommel's Land" (whose cover of similarities in style and colors to that of Uriah Heep's "The Magician's Birthday" even led to think that it was a design by Roger Dean when in fact it was created by illustrator Heinz Dofflein following Kahrs' indications), is one of the most important works of German symphonic rock and one of the creative pinnacles of the satirical and brilliant Grobschnitt.

Very good.

4 stars

Social review comments

Review related links

• Send comments to Hector Enrique
• Report this review (#3192083)
• Buy GROBSCHNITT music online with PA partners
• Show all GROBSCHNITT MP3/Stream
• Go to GROBSCHNITT page for videos, full discography with ratings, reviews and much more
• Go to Rockpommel's Land page for more details, where to buy and ratings/reviews
• Search the Forum for GROBSCHNITT related discussions