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Eloy - Power and the Passion CD (album) cover

POWER AND THE PASSION

Eloy

 

Psychedelic/Space Rock

3.69 | 511 ratings

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Einsetumadur
Prog Reviewer
2 stars 6/15P.: Forty minutes of well-arranged boredom from Lower Saxony, always on the ridge between decent psychedelia and school band lyricism, marred further by bad vocals. At least the band has a distinct way of paying tribute to their British heroes.

Oh well. Digging in the paternal record collection is pretty exciting, but as soon as you reach the CDs which have lain in the shelf unopened since the 1980s you know that, given that your father's records are otherwise in accordance with your own taste, you won't find a masterpiece there.

I've got a particularly early CD reissue of this album which seems to be from 1988 - it's unbelievable that it's almost 30 years since the first audio CDs were sold (ABBA's The Visitors, Oldfield's Crises etc.). Anyway, the first thing I saw of this album was, in capital letters, HAHAHAHAHA in the paperfold booklet.

Connaisseurs of this band know from which song this quotation is taken. Yes, it's The Zany Magician. In this song a magician shouts some phrases halfway between the content of a Grimm fairytale and of an English schoolbook for young German pupils. One quotation? The wings of a bat, the blood of a cat, the skin of a rat, it does taste nice. So that's the recipe. Some disgusting parts of animals thrown together. Pretty inventive, ain't it? Or try another verse: This is the brew, try it it's new. And then the magician laughs again. And this laughing is acted awfully, on top of a stomping flimsy Uriah Heep rhythm which should sound heavy. Standard power chords, a standard rhythm, and a bad actor. That's it. Seems like it's time to rhetorically ask for the zero star button again.

Perhaps you should know the basic plot of the album to understand why this magician actually appears. A youngster from the 20th century with a spliff in his pocket timetravels to the Paris of the 14th century, meets a girl and smokes a doobie with her. He gets imprisoned after he is in some way involved in a people's revolution, then wants to return to his home again and finds a magician who gives him a drink which returns him into the 20th century - leaving the girl from the 14th century behind.

It's a cute story, a typical time travelling story with heavy influences of Mark Twain's great novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but none of the band members was a great English writer, and none of them was a great philosopher either. For instance in Love over Six Centuries the girl from the 14th century replies oh what a beautiful feeling, everything shimmers in the twilight when she smokes her first joint - until the 20th century guy aloudly proclaims that he must find a way how to bridge the time, or something like that. You know by now that this album features by far more style than substance, yes, and it's an awfully pretentious concept as well, but it's authentic. You could ask yourself which young musician from the Germany of the 1970s didn't think about smoking weed, travelling through time and reflecting the dictatorship-democracy problem of the Middle Ages - and most importantly the question how to become as big as David Gilmour.

This album surely didn't make Bornemann a German Gilmour. The lead guitar, present in the lengthy Mutiny, doesn't trouble me, but it's at most mediocre and lackluster. Frank Bornemann was much better on Inside and Ocean, but this time it just won't work. Bass guitar and drums are much better, but still quite conventional, mostly doing the standard Teutonic 6/8 signature all the time. This mixture of hymnic melodies and this fastly galloping 6/8 rhythm was typical of Eloy, and many of the Nordic metal bands still do the same stuff, that's why I give this rhythm that name. But Manfred Wieczorke's keyboards are the special ingredient which gives this album a certain charme; he's a big fan of string machines, and the analogue waves rushing by are nice to listen to. Mutiny is actually the track on this album which allows the most unspoiled listening pleasure. At 2:13 the band even creates some tension, ending up in the aforementioned guitar solo, creating new tension at 3:10 and then finishing that part with a tasty Moog solo on top of some muscular bass work. The Bells of Notre Dame tries to be a rousing finale, but it fails. It's got the slow rhythm, and it's got the reverberated guitar ending, but it cannot live up to the expectations one has when a band sets up such a large scale concept album.

Love over Six Centuries is doubtlessly the most successful effort of creating atmosphere on this album: a hypnotic drum rhythm, a monotonous bass loping around and lots of string synths and Rick Wright-like Moog soloing on the top. But this track is marred severely by the stoned dialogue of the guy and the girl about the landlord, smoking pot, time-eroding drugs and that stuff - and this dialogue is spilled all over these 10 minutes. The dialogue makes sense in the context of the story, but it shifts the good music in the background. The first 3 minutes however are the artistic peak of this album; the snotty vocal delivery by Bornemann is quite cool, the organs float and shimmer and the guitar is convincing. Still I wonder why two guitarists contribute to the album when you never hear more than just one more or less decent guitar. After all the promising music all possibly created atmosphere is destroyed in the end when Bornemann tries to cry like David Byron or Ian Gillan - there simply is no excuse for such a misstep. You need to have an extraordinarily strong voice to sing in this screaming or crying style convincingly.

Interestingly the other short tracks are often quite decent. The pompous Introduction is acceptable with the fanfares of Hammond organ and unexpected Gregorian vocalizations by Bornemann which turn out well, whilst Daybreak is entirely copied from a riff in the beginning of Eloy's decent epic Land of No Body (2:33) from the previous album. But the melody of Journey into 1358 stays in your head for some hours when you listen to it, and just singing on top of the string machine Bornemann's vocals are quite acceptable. For the first time there's this Teutonic galloping rhythm entering at 1:04. Imprisonment (with really good Leslie rhythm guitar!) and Thoughts of Home are more reflective, the latter with some clavinet thrown in for good measure, and they - unlike most of the other tunes - might even be worth a 3 star rating. Back Into The Present is okay, but the band seemingly cannot cope with this fast rhythm. And in this piece you really notice how flat-chested the drum sound is. Perhaps the remaster has changed something about that, but I don't think so.

All in all this album is a huge disappointment after the devastating power of Eloy's Inside album. The Emerson, Lake & Palmer-like bombast and lyrical pseudo-demand just didn't fit in with Eloy at that time. With Klaus Schmidtchen on keyboards and lyricist Jürgen Rosenthal on drums it worked out better on the following albums, albeit still with audible faults which in the end kept the band from international stardom and sustained recognition.

Anyway you don't need to get this album. The nice ideas are rendered in a nearly unlistenable way, with all of these strangely bumpy English formulations, the accent-laden and unexpressive vocals as well as the progressive rock cliches which appear in all of the songs. Two stars overall, a worse rating would be unfair due to the nice ideas and good keyboard sounds present on the whole album.

Einsetumadur | 2/5 |

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