LUCIFER'S FRIEND

I much prefer the more stripped down version of this band and all of that attitude that came with it on those first two albums. Even the opening section of the almost 12 minute "Spanish Galleon" bugs me, not because I don't like it but it sounds just like SANTANA so not very original of course. Also after the SANATANA vibe leaves we get blasting horns that is one of my pet peeves, it just sounds lame. The song does get better after this and it's quite adventerous.

I'm not big on the poppy chorus on "Thus Spoke Oberon" but it's pretty good overall. We get a short and catchy track called "High Flying Lady-Goodbye" with some blasting horns and lots of energy. The over 11 minute "Sorrow" is my least favourite for a number of reasons. The horns, the orchestral sounds, ballad-like vocals earlier but as usual there's something I enjoy like the opening drumming and the electric piano. The closer "Dirty Old Town" is okay but rather forgettable.

Hard to believe this is the same band that did their 1972 debut and the followup "Where The Groupies Killed The Blues" the following year. Still this is impressive and most rate it high.

Their third album from 1973 called "I'm Just A Rock 'N' Roll Singer" is much more straightforward AOR type music while 1974's "Banquet" is probably the most adventerous and proggy but a step down from the first two in my opinion mainly because I feel there's things that just don't work like the blasting horns. Yes this band did not like to repeat themselves. Kind of cool that the bad dudes on the album cover of the debut are up in the top left corner of this cover art tying the two together.

Love the first two tracks, I mean just a great way to start the album with "Hobo" and the rebel yell to start from Lawton. This is heavy and catchy with those incredible vocals over top. A lot going on here. "Rose In The Vine" opens with haunting piano and I should have mentioned that the keyboardist plays organ, piano, mellotron and moog. When this kicks in before 2 minutes it's an "oh my"moment. Raw sounding guitar then a calm with bluesy vocals. Those vocals do get passionate followed by an innovative instrumental section.

We get strings and some cool vocal arrangements on "Mother". Check out the guitar tone just before 5 minutes. Some nice contrasts on the title track and I was reminded a little of Dio fronted BLACK SABBATH on "Prince Of Darkness". I like the samples on the closer "Burning Ships" a mellow tune until the final 1 1/2 minutes.

Two amazing albums from this band and many will point to "Banquet" as the third such album.

This type of heavy psych / proto-prog / early metal has a given Achilles heel; with its pentatonic rhythm & blues roots its quite hard to keep it interesting for a full record. Bands like Heep and Purple would excel in songwriting and therefor became famous, whereas Lucifer's Friends great sounding album suffers from a lack of gripping songs after the initial run of three rather good songs ('Ride The Sky', 'Everybody's Clown' and 'Keep Goin''). The second side of the vinyl is a bit tiring to listen to, even if its hard to point out its precise faults. 'Baby You're A Liar' has some great heavy psych/prog parts though. After this album the band would record a more progressive and jazz-infused record with a poor sounding production when compared to this one. I would rate this record 3,5 stars. A must-have for heavy psych collectors and fans of this brand of Vanilla Fudge-type hardrock.

It must be said that playing this album is like putting on a warm blanket, it is instantly comforting, and Lawton (if Wikipedia is to be believed) shows no sign at all of being 73 years old! His voice is as powerful as it has ever been, and the ten numbers he has written with Hesslein shows a band who are determined to make their presence felt as opposed to resting on their laurels. It has been fifty years since Lawton left Stonewall and joined the members of The German Bonds in forming Asterix, which became Lucifer's Friend', but those decades have flown by on this classic hard rock album which could have been recorded in their heyday. The guitars are as tough, plenty of riffs, while the keyboard provide levity, but whatever is going on underneath is lifted by the superb vocals of Lawton. I dare anyone to play "Call The Captain" and not smile at its' annoying infectious simplicity ? one can imagine this being a radio hit in the Eighties, and that is probably as up to date as the band gets, but who cares? Classic rock, from a band who really were there at the beginning, this is for fans of bands as diverse as Uriah Heep and UFO, and everything in-between. If ever an album defined "fun" then this is it.

Heavy prog was the bands genre on the first two albums. Then they changed direction. Progressive they remained but in another way. This, their fourth, is not very much hard rock but is instead one of the most accomplished jazzrock albums I have heard, and I've actually listened quite alot to that genre. The fact that pure hardrock is almost entirely missing from the album does not mean it is any less powerful. The songs on this album are extremely energetic and just as majestic, muscular and forceful as any hardrock album from the day. To me this is the most focused of all Lucifer's Friend albums I have heard. It's like everything came to them in a haze of divine inspiration. Each and every instrument is something to marvel at and follow. Just listen to the bass player, for instance. He works his way up and down that neck like there's no tomorrow. And you mustn't forget the utterly brilliant vocalist John Lawton. Man, what a voice.

Out of the five tracks on this album three are five star songs in my book. "Spanish galleon" with it's pirate themed imagery, "Thus spoke Oberon" and "Sorrow" are mindblowing examples of jazzrock and rank (according to me) alongside the supposedly greatest in the genre. I do not think it's possible to make greater jazzrock than this, actually. Out of the two remaining tracks one is merely okay and the other one great. "High-flying lady goodbye" (2 stars) is somewhat in the Status Quo vein and the closing "Dirty old town" (4) is a ballad-y but energetic song. Quite a good way to end an album of such sparkling and powerful music.

Sorry to say Lucifer's Friend really never hit these heights again. This was and is their greatest moment. And what a statement it is! I have loved this album for the last 20 odd years and it feels as vibrant and engaging now as it did back then. If you like jazzrock (Chicago, If, Blood Sweat and Tears, Colosseum and so on...) I bet you will find things on this album to cherish. If you bought this album thinking it would be filled to the brim of heavy metal, don't be too disappointed. Listen to it with an open mind and I'll bet you just might reconsider.

Had it not been for "High-flying lady goodbye" I just might have considered giving this album five stars but as it stands I'll give it four. Still, a marvellous album by a sometime marvellous band.

What do you think that would be the world's reaction if BLACK SABBATH, on their fourth album, decided to swap their sonority to jazz fusion? In short terms, this is what happened here. Heavy & doom metal (too) forerunners LUCIFER'S FRIEND took no time to abandon their dark style and opt for freaking jazz. Doing something like this in the 70s naturally got them criticized; it was an era where familiarity was fundamental for a band's success (no one would buy BLACK SABBATH hoping for jazz fusion) after all. Actually, they did this swap earlier - on their second album - but it was with BANQUET they departed from everything they represented hitherto. A highly venturesome move and progressive indeed.

Sadly, they don't do so well. BANQUET is a mountain peak album. It climaxes rapidly, but its captivation dies equally quickly. There are no flaws found in Spanish Galleon, the album's peak: John Lawton's vocal performance is intense, the guitar is virtuoso, the piano is smooth and quick-paced, and Herb Geller's brass sections sounds terrific. Simply put, it is a perfect multi-layered allegory for what a band can achieve with jazz fusion pretensions. Thus Spoke Oberon - the edge of the cliff - lacks the instrumental eclecticism, being more guitar and piano oriented, but is nonetheless good.

What happens next is that LUCIFER'S FRIEND bluesy sides, which weren't properly exorcised, start to speak louder. The frenzied energy begins to fade, turning mostly into piano tracks a la Elton John (with, uhm, 'jazz', I suppose). High- Flying Lady is an absolute buzz killer after the first two excellent tracks. Sorrow is as large as Spanish Galleon but not nearly as interesting. Dirty Old Down is almost boogie-woogie, if I recall correctly.

The supposedly defunct band, thanks to the internet, hit the road again since 2015. LUCIFER'S FRIEND released an (apparently) good album in 2016. They are also actively searching for their old record songs' lyrics. For as much as BANQUET failed to impress me as a jazz fusion album, I recommend trying it nonetheless. The first two tracks (which by themselves are roughly half the album) suffices to make it a worthy purchase. Well, worthy enough to make me interested on its creators' interesting historic after all, especially now they've been brought back from the dead.

It turned out that this is a compilation that also brings us 4 brand new tracks from the core of Lucifer's Friends line up.

Now, let me say that this CD had everything to be a 5 stars. Lucifer's Friend is a great (and underrated) band with some amazing material and a great singer (John Lawton). And indeed, the music here is absolutely amazing, both the old tracks and surprinsingly the new 4 tracks too!

The fact this is going to be a 4 stars to me is the way they packaged everything. TO begin with there's only ten tracks on the compilation (CD 1). According to the CD booklet the tracks were chosen after a research in the web and the band thought that these were the tracks the fans liked most... this is dubious. In the end they have 4 songs out of the first album, one song out of Where The Groupies Killed The Blues, 2 songs out of Mind Exploding, 1 song out of Banquet and 2 songs out of Mean Machine. That means that there's no songs from I'm Just a Rock 'n' Roll Singer, Good Time Warrior, Sneak Me In or Sumo Grip for that matter and the CD is only 47 minutes long. The band could have packed the CD1 with more songs, songs from all the studio albums, etc.

Then we have a second CD with the 4 new tracks and it clocks only 17 minutes long. Now, if you have 47 minutes in one CD and 17 on the other, why not pack them together? Aesthetic reasons? Well, CHerry Red (their distributor) is selling it for the price of a single CD so I think it doesn't matter in the end, but for practical reasons it should have been better off with a single disc.

But hey, don't let my ramblings fool you, Awakening is well worth it buying, specially if you don't own their old studio records. For the old fans the 4 new songs are high quality material that brings the old Lucifer's Friend to a new era and John Lawton still sings amazingly well!

Only the album is from 1970. Uriah Heep had only just released their debut with "Gypsy" and Deep Purple's "In Rock" album was still fairly fresh. There was no excuse; no one to blame. Lucifer's Friend, with its bone- reverberating, fuzz-toned guitar, power chords, its rumbling Hammond organ, its pounding drums and bass, and John Lawton howling and screaming at the mic, was quite simply right there are the starting gate when 1970 delivered this new European take on high-powered, heavy rock music.

I found this album after checking out a playlist of proto-metal bands of the early 70's on YouTube and was floored. I had already heard and acquired albums by several proto-metal bands whose existence I had never heard of previously, but this was something else. Why hadn't I heard of these guys?! As a 1970 album this should have been ringing in the annals of heavy rock history straight through the 70's and into the 80's. But this album, among dozens of other enjoyable but less impressive, never crossed my path until late 2013.

There are no slow songs here. Everything is charged and powered up to full. There are some great heavy riffs and a consistent feeling of power behind the music. The title track features John Lawton wailing out some fantastic screams and there are some superb heavy guitar chords. The album opener pays tribute to Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song" using French horn for Robert Plant's classic vocal intro. There are some short rockers and some longer developed pieces and nothing is short on early metal energy and volume.

This is one hekuva proto-metal album and worth a solid four stars for that. However, this here is a prog site and I honestly hear very little that sounds "progressive". If you consider that what gave progressive rock its name in the first place was the music by bands like King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, ELP, Gentle Giant, Van Der Graaf Generator, and Premiata Forneria Marconi then Lucifer's Friend has almost nothing to offer except for the instrumental "Horla" which appears as a bonus track and features some more advanced time signatures. But that's alright because this album doesn't sound like that of a band trying to prove themselves as a rock group performing music for an orchestra. This is pure and simple proto-metal at its finest. I'd give it two stars for prog. But a solidly planted four stars for an early heavy metal album. Split here to three stars.

This is top shelf heavy prog; it's fully recommendable to fans of the subgenre. Every track on LUCIFER'S FRIEND is good. However, one could say there's some justification for the fact that the last five tracks were just bonus tracks for many years. My favorite tracks are "Keep Goin" and "Lucifer's Friend:. I think it's because of the menacing atmosphere of these songs. It injects some variety into the overall intensity of the band's sound.

I stated that I'm not a big fan of keyboard-driven music, but all the band members are brilliant. Peter Hesslein's a terrific guitarist, and the other players sound just right for this type of heavy metal. John Lawton is just amazing, one of the best singers in hard rock. I haven't listened to much Uriah Heep, but I have a feeling that I'm really missing out. In conclusion, this is an excellent album for prog fans with any love for hard rock. Only BANQUET would earn the extra quarter star for being more progressive on a track-by-track basis. 3.75 stars rounded up.

Straight 5/5 stars rating for this awesomely heavy album!