FIRST

Dies Irae was a 70`s progressive/psychedelic Hard Rock Band from Germany. Their sound is quite similiar to Black Sabbath at some times (especially Track 1. Lucifer, 3.Another Room). This similiarity has it reasons in the quite dark and slightly satanistic(?) song texts dealing with topics like armageddon and so on... But this is not everything... There is another thing which makes me really like this album: It has really interesting harmonica work (even a harmonica solo) on it and sometimes it even edges the psychedelic sound of their landmates ASH RA TEMPEL in " Tired" and the obviously drug glorifying Song "Red Libanese" If you like either the 70´s hard rock with dark influence or the atmospheric sound of Ash Ra Temple or even a Fusion of both i really recommend this album. A weak point maybe are the english vocals (like it was for many german bands of that time)

This is a bizarre blend between hard rockin songs of Scorpions at their very beginning with stoned atmospheres from the krautrock galaxy. The heavy jamming guitar sessions represent a real musical attraction, constantly propulsive with space rock effects. "Lucifer" is a heavy rock "trip", featuring an aggressive blast of rhythmical guitars, stoned voices. " Salve Oimel" is exclusively made of recitations. "Another Room" goes back to an intense spaced free sounding rock, largely made of echoing groovy guitars, a lot of "trippeness". "Trip" is an amazing, almost "ethereal" acid rock composition. "Tired" is a boggie, rock 'n roll song, in the tradition." Witches meeting" is a pretty good heavy rock improvisation dominated by inspired guitars. Hippy freak like style in the genre of Shanandoa. Heavy psych-out musical action that will ravish fans of krautrock!

Tripped out psychedelic blues/rock which can be compared to everything from Chuck Berry on quailudes to some early Earth/Black Sabbath. Recorded over a period of 25 hours by top-flight German recording engineer Connie Plank at Star recording studios in Hamburg in June '71, this one off album from Dies Irae ( Day Of Wrath ) achieved some notoriety at the time of it's release because many radio stations refused to play it because of dabblings in the occult even though the drugged out vocals ( sung in English ) were barely comprehensible through the narcotic haze which prevades over most of the album.

Although there are a few tracks ( Lucifer, Another Room, Armagedon Dragonlove ) that get into some groovin' blues/rock riffing there's just too much LSD in these concoctions especially the drugged out vocals to take too seriously. Tired picks up the pace somewhat followed by Witches Meeting which gets into some freaky guitar effects but too much time is wasted on a couple of directionless bass and drum solos here. Red Lebanese Parts 1&2 ( another drug of choice? ) continues on with a bit more structure and more freaky guitar and gets into a jazzier blues slant with Red Lebanese Part 2 briefly becoming more melodic with some acoustic thrown into the mixture along with some toned down electric guitar then returning to the original blues riff. The strangest track on the record and the one which perhaps holds the most curiousity is simply titled Trip. Basically a sound experiment, again with various guitar treatments that was also made into a surreal short 8mm film, a visual presentation of an LSD trip that was even shown on German TV!

Unfortunately the creative potential of these far out blues, rock and elecronic studio experiments are not fully realized because every groove they hit is just not exploited to the max. There are certainly some really cool moments in this mindtrip from these blues hippies, mostly thanks to Plank's studio wizardry, but Die Israe's First will hold more appeal for followers of '60s head counter-culture than it will for the uninitiated. The band was reformed briefly in the early '90s and three live tracks from First ( Lucifer, Another Room and Trip) appear on a 1991 album, Saarlive, recorded in their hometown of Saarbrucken, Germany which are by far superior and more mature than the versions presented here.

Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), is in fact a Latin hymn from the thirteenth century. There we go, I bet not many people knew that. What? you did ... smarty pants... all of you! .

What we have here is, as other reviewers have commented, a band that sound remarkably like 'Black Sabbath' - a band I've never been keen on. However, the saving grace is the fact that there's a fair bit originality in amongst the run of the mill heavy rock numbers.

Take a look in 'YouTube' for the great video to 'Trip'. (It really is a video - whoever said 'Bohemian Rhapsody was first there is wrong!). You'll see some dodgy characters here who's faces you'd just love to punch! A great tune which is very reminiscent of Floyd circa 'Meddle' but NOT representative of the album as a whole.

Unfortunately most of the other tracks are pretty much straight rock, although the album is disturbingly catchy considering I really can't be bothered with this style of music.

Rainer Wahlmann's vocals are pretty good but derivative in their execution. The drums get pass marks too with some bloke named Andreas Cornelius giving it some serious 'welly'. But, crumbs almighty - gonna sack that harmonica! Yeeuuuch!

A real mish mash of an album that barely scrapes 3 stars. From the dreadfully bad to the dull and ordinary to the surprisingly cool within it's short 36 minute duration. It's not bad... but nothing great.

One of the lesser known earliest German Krautrock bands, the Saarbrücken band DIES IRAE adopted the Latin phrase with means "Day of Wrath" as its moniker when it formed in 1968 and stuck around for five years before calling it a day. The band consisted of Andreas F. Cornelius (drums), Robert J. Schiff (bass), Harald H.G. Thoma (guitar, vocals) and Cord Wahlmann ( lead vocals, harmonica) and retained the psychedelic rock attributes of the 1960s while adding the hard rock sounds that had become popular by the time the band's sole album FIRST hit the market in 1971.

DIES IRAE was quite popular on the German live circuit and shared the stage with many of the bands that would become Krautrock legends but for many reasons DIES IRAE did not enjoy the longevity that many of its contemporaries have enjoyed with the resurgence of psychedelic music and therefore have been pretty much forgotten by all except the hardcore Kraut addicts who seek out the obscurities. One of the problems with FIRST when it was released in 1971 was that the occult lyrical content was extremely controversial and while other Kraut bands were receiving radio airplay time, this band was literally shunned.

However when a band becomes banned, there are always those who seek out the forbidden fruits of the music industry and therefore this band has enjoyed a cult following over the decades complete with CD reissues. Another problem with FIRST is that it is all over the place with the opening track "Lucifer" featuring a hard rock repertoire with bluesy rock and even a harmonica. Compared to early Black Sabbath, which is totally legit, the band totally abandoned the hard rock aspects in the middle of the album and with the track "Trip" drifts off into true psychedelic freakery much like Can did on "Tago Mago" and bands like Faust and Cluster did all the time.

Although the opening track "Lucifer" is rather silly and amateurish, the remaining heavier tracks remind me more of the Scorpions' debut album "Lonesome Crow" which was basically a bridge between the psychedelic Krautrock of the early 70s with the more straight forward hard rock of the latter part of the decade. Unfortunately lead vocalist Rainer Gerd Walhmann doesn't quite match the charismatic singing prowess of Klaus Meine but he does get the job done. The album's bizarre inconsistency reminds me of those late 70s albums where bands were forced to stuff in a career's worth of ideas because they knew they only had one shot and therefore FIRST seems more like a collection of tracks rather than a cohesive album experience but having stated that, it's actually all quite pleasant and totally fits in with the Kraut vibe of the year 1971, opening track excluded.

Unfortunately first impressions do matter. The opening track "Lucifer" may sour this one for many and the unattractive barbed wire fence album cover evokes more of a concentration camp scene rather than a Kraut filled escapist's paradise. Yeah, the DIES IRAE members were not masters of marketing by any means but with the right guidance this band certainly had the talent to take things a bit farther and deserved a couple more albums since the potential is obvious from the tight-knit musicianship and the effortless transition between lysergic floatiness to bluesy hard rock. The band did have a brief reunion in 1991 but no new album came from it so DIES IRAE remains one of those one and done bands that released a sole artifact on the timeline and then went bye-bye. This is one of those albums that's a bit hard to rate. It's not good enough for 4 stars yet is too good for 3 so i guess 3.5 stars is warranted. Rounded down to 3 though.