STARRING ROSI

After three albums of intense, acid-fried space rock and a turbulent collaboration with Harvard jailbird / LSD advocate Timothy Leary, who can blame guitarist Manuel Göttsching for wanting to kick back and have a little fun with his fiancé?

In retrospect, however, he probably should have released the album under his own name. Anyone expecting another mind-bending, mood-altering Ash Ra Tempel experience is likely to be disappointed by the entirely earthbound results: a scant 35-minutes of sometimes pleasant but mostly negligible underachievement by one of rock music's more visionary artists.

Even with able assistance from drummer Harald Großkopf and veteran producer Dieter Dierks the album never rises above the level of a vanity project, and strictly speaking is for completists only. The music itself isn't actually poor, just...unnecessary, and too often undermined by its similarity to the sort of acts other Krautrockers avoided on principle, sounding at times not unlike Santana (in the song "Bring Me Up") or, believe it or not, the Allman Brothers ("Laughter Loving")

Clearly the unique creative spirit that had burned so incandescent during the Kosmische Rock era was in danger of becoming extinguished. And I think it's fair to say that girlfriend Rosi Mueller may not have been the most effective muse Göttsching ever had. Really, what else can be said about an album on which the best song ("Day Dream") is a drifting spoken-word fantasy about a little gypsy queen who lives in Rainbow Land?