VIVE LA TRANCE

By the time of their 6th album, Amon Düül II sounds creatively drained. The preceding Wolf City had shown a turn towards more conventional rock material with art-rock and folk influences. Vive La Trance follows the same way but mostly without the ideas to make it work.

The album starts out excellently though. A Morning Excuse features a fine psych blues riff with low spoken word verses and a very Brian Ferry alike chorus. In fact, the whole song sounds very much like Roxy Music did in 1973. Fly United is an acid folk rock tune. Nothing spectacular but just fine. Jalousie is a very smoky balled with a delicate and very high-pitched vocal from Renate Kaupf. She sounds almost like Kate Bush here. Im Krater concludes the best part of the album with a relaxed instrumental that could have been from Hawkwind. On Mozambique, Renate goes acid-prog-folk again, not a bad tune but it's the last song from the album that speaks to me. Not that the remainder is bad but I'd rather recommend it to fans of Bowie, Eno and Rob Calvert.

After the strong first four songs the album quickly runs out of ideas and the remaining material is of less interest to me as it belongs more to the 70s art-rock school of which I've never been the biggest fan. With around 15 minutes of fresh ideas this is an average effort from a band in decline. 2.5 stars.