ILLEGAL

ILLEGAL was released in 1981, hardly a year associated with good prog music. I don't know if GROBSCHNITT were living in their own world but they came back with a rather pleasant album , not a sure guarantee back then. Of course, the sound has been updated on some tracks as LUPO the guitarist is not afraid now to play some good hard rock guitar here and there. Also a new bassist joined the band:MILLA KAPOLKE taking over ''POPO'' and curiously hasn't been assigned a nickname like everybody else.

The symphonic sound has been forgotten for a more mainstream sound, more rock but the quality of the songwriting remains.THE SNIFFER and MARY GREEN are still songs with nice melodies and great prog arrangements. Lupo still proves he knows how to bring life out of this guitar. Sure there is some 80s synth sounding in some parts, but we expected that and anyway it's not too overwhelming enough to detroy a song.

SILENT MOVIE is a cute acoustic instrumental lullaby with mellotron, nice melodic guitar,very sweet.SPACE RIDER is GROBSCHNITT first attempt at hard rock, not necessarily a home run, but not bad either.JOKER is an average GENESIS like-ABACAB period with some cheesy synth sounds in some places, but the rest especially the ending is good.The title track brought us back to ''funny'' Grobschnitt with strong comic German accents to start before some heavy hard rock riffs launch the song going into an hypnotic rythm accompanied by psychedelic sounds and vocals for quite a few minutes before the heavy guitar reappears to end the song.

But this ILLEGAL track would sound better in a live environment like on the excellent THE GROBSCHNITT STORY-VOL 1, 10mns of full madness. SIMPLE DIMPLE is a little mid-tempo rocker that would be played live each night for years to come and RAINTIME the last track of the album sounds like a hippie acoustic ballad, a ....californian band of the sixties or DONOVAN could have played back then.

ILLEGAL sure won't please anyone, even some old fans of the band might be turned off by GROBSCHNITT 1981; This is not DIE SYMPHONIE, this is not ROCKPOMMELS ISLAND either and definitely nothing to compare with SOLAR FIRE but ILLEGAL is still a pleasant album to my ears; at least one person is happy!!

ILLEGAL is not sell-out music; this is still GROBSCHNITT, maybe a more modern GROBSCHNITT, but GROBSCHNITT is the name. This is not where to start with the band, but i am happy to own this CD.

3 STARS.

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