4 TIMES SOUND RAZING

SILBERBART were a power trio from Germany who released one album back in 1971.These guys are twisted man, I mean they aren't normal ! When the singer screams and shrieks he sounds like a young Geddy Lee, and the music here is very psychedelic and "out there" at times, while at others it's heavy and raw. Some great ideas from these guys though as they take us on a trip far from what is sane and normal. Yes this is vintage Krautrock.

The first song "Chub Chub Cherry" is my least favourite and the most straight forward of the 4 tracks. It's the shortest (4 1/2 minutes) too as the others all clock in at over 10 minutes. Aggressive guitar and raw vocals lead the way until the chorus where he whispers "chub chub cherry" a few times.That's the part I don't like. "Brain Brain" is haunting to begin with as softly sung vocals come in. A sudden unexpectant explosion of sound erupts 3 minutes in with a chilling and deranged scream for good measure. It kicks into an uptempo melody 5 1/2 minutes in and vocals come in before 6 minutes. I really like the guitar 7 minutes in and the psychedelic freak outs that follow. A "far out" calm settles in and then he starts singing in a reserved manner before 12 1/2 minutes. A heavy beat arrives before 14 minutes and the guitar starts to make some noise.

"God" is heavy and kind of dark to open. Nice. It turns psychedelic before 2 minutes before kicking back in a minute later with an awesome guitar solo that lights it up. Vocals are back before 4 minutes. It turns gloomy with almost spoken vocals then it kicks back in again. Fantastic sound 8 1/2 minutes in. Several times this song seems to end but then starts up again. "Head Tear Of The Drunken Sun" is where he reminds me of Geddy when he screams, and he does that a lot. Haha. A nice heavy sound here and it's kind of catchy. It turns spooky almost alarming really before 6 minutes. Dissonant sounds follow or maybe insane is the word i'm looking for. It kicks back in before 9 minutes. Nice bass here with some blistering guitar a minute later. Vocals are back again 10 1/2 minutes in.

An adventerous trip into the bizarre and unknown awaits for all who are willing to take the chance.

Diabolus in Musica

Starting out with a somewhat straightforward heavy prog song with screeching vocals - sounding like you´ve just surprised the singer in the shower while he was busy masturbating to an Iron Maiden track, this album is anything but your normal progressive recording. Chub Chub Cherry, as the starter´s called, is what I´d call an anomaly within 4 Times Sound Razing, and for lack of a better phrase to pin it down - it just feels pasted on, standing tall like a lesbian gorilla at your local church´s Christmas sermon. It´s a pity, because the rest of the album screams for a better and far more appropriate beginning - one who could tell stories of the scheming devil inside the music, and how it got there.

When you get past this rather uncharacteristic opener from Silberbart, and venture some minutes into the following Brain Brain, you realize what an amazing, out there and freakishly original record this is - and perhaps first of all, how different this band really sounds! As a matter of fact, the avid listener will probably get to that conclusion far earlier than that, and most likely feel disorientated and perplexed - thinking: is this really the same band? If so, how did those drugs manage to take a hold so damn quickly?

The main ingredient to this mayhem, is the amazing storm-trooper guitarist Hajo Teschner, and although I don´t particularly enjoy his vocals, which are close to distraught, semi yelping, acid drenched and approaching that of someone crying out helplessly from a bad dream, - you can´t really dismiss this guy´s extraordinary talents on the guitar.

How does it sound then? Hhmm.... Imagine this highly gifted axeman being taken away by the government on some bull[&*!#] charge, like wearing too many shirts with orange colours, licking stamps at the veggie section in the local supermarket, or being quite fond of Cat Stevens even after he really went solo - it doesn´t matter though. This musical prodigy gets thrown in the darkest pit you could ever imagine, bereft of light, food, and constantly subjected to a mind-numbingly loud playing soundtrack of Boney M, Schlager music, Metal Machine Music and Dolly Parton played at the wrong speed. This goes on for a week or 2, and then finally before releasing this poor guy, they tell him that they had to barbecue his beloved poodle, simply because of an overpowering curiosity - due to a baffling question raised during one crazy night of Trivial Pursuit. Then imagine driving, what now surely must be one ticked off bugger to the nearest gig, where his band-mates eagerly await the return of their front man, and then you´re nearly there. The wildness and total brutality of Teschner is what drives this band. He roams some of the same lands as Tony Iommi, even if he sounds much more bewildering and enraged.

The music here is created by this terrific guitar creating demented riffing, spiralling solos that seem to go off the map - to never never land presumably. Behind the man possessed sits one hell of a drummer, who much like Ginger Baker, is able to conform whatever hard hitting psychedelic mantra subjected to him into some form of groove. And boy does he provide groove! With some aptly placed double-pedal work, and a penchant for long drawn out musical bridges performed on the toms, the Baker reference is not that far off. Just beware of some of the jamming bits, which lurks around this album like long lost booby-traps of the east. They sit comfortably, awaiting the unsuspecting listener, and BOOOM! goes off - blasting you out of your comfort zone with some furiously played guitar, that sounds like it´s successfully been mated with an Indian raga gone berserk. The drumming patterns shift, and goes completely mental - mimicking a tropical storm with roaring cymbals and insanely played anti-rhythms.

You really have to give it up for the bass player here. Werner Klug is his name, and he is what keeps this earth-shatteringly musical mania from torpedoing out beyond any form of comprehension. He is very much the quintessential bass player operation, which he quite magnificently masters down to the t. He works like great big tent poles for a mad circus from hell, and keeps the thing from flying away in the impending hurricanes, which oddly enough seem to stem from the performers themselves. Cirque du Soleil brings its own storms y´know?

I´d recommend this captivating album to fans of The Flower Travelling Band´s Satori. Devotees of early heavy German psychedelic hard rockers like Jane, Birth Control, Black Widow, - and maybe to those out there in the big wide world, who can imagine a porous and slightly demented version of Black Sabbath running wildly across violet landscapes of melting Krautrock sands. 3.5 stars.

By 1971 things were getting rockier, hairier and generally more flared. 'Silberbart' went the whole 9 yards... and not just when ordering their trousers.

This is an annoying hard psych album from 1971 that is generally uninteresting, other than the vocals of Hajo Teschner which have to be heard to be believed.

I listened to this driving to work last week and decided not to wear my seat-belt simply because I wanted to die in a motor way crash before this album finished.

This is a rough and grainy sounding recording in the same vein as 'Guru Guru, Night Sun and Nosferatu'. That doesn't mean it's any good folks.

Listening to vocalist Hajo Teschner is an excruciating experience. What is intended as a vocal roar from Tarzan comes out as a thin, wandering shriek that shares its pitch with a ten year old child who is narrowly averting some Play Station disaster. It's feeble in the extreme, none more so than in 'Chub-Chub-Cherry' which on hearing is enough to make your neck curl up to your ears.

The vast bulk of '4 Times Sound Razing' is utterly forgettable and the parts that aren't, you wish were. Extremely raw electric guitars are wailed out for all who are willing to listen, and quite frankly, I'm not one. There's even a part where the bass is out of synch with the rest of the band.

Even their so-called masterwork 'Brain Brain' issues forth an ugly, crude straight Kraut track that could be better executed by any number of bands from the same era.

This is a towering monument to drivel and quite frankly exudes all the expressive physical dynamism of an unplugged Standard Lamp. Similar in many ways to my most disliked album in the entire Archive by 'Hairy Chapter' - this runs it a close second. Despite having a great sleeve this is one of the poorest albums I've ever heard.

Straddled between the peak years of prog rock and the heavy psych 60s, Germany's Varel (by the North Sea) based SILBERBART (Silverbeard) was formed in 1969 by guitarist / vocalist Hajo Teschner who spent the latter half of swinging 60s in a band called Tonics which to his dismay resided on the commercial end of things which pleased him not. After his Tonics bandmates jumped ship and joined the James Last band, Teschner decided to pursue a more adventurous route in the nascent Krautrock years and after combining forces with percussionist Gerd Bäker and bassist Peter Bahrens the newly founded SILBERBART resorted to playing cover songs by Deep Purple, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and the band whose sound was most vital to SILBERBART's future independence, Cream.

Once Bäker departed and was replaced by the jazz drummer Peter Behrens, Teschner was finally allowed to nurture his latent inner freak and the true SILBERBART unfolded into the mysteries that composed the early 70s in all its avant-garde majesty. While accelerating towards the future, the trio remained anchored to the heavy psych rock antics of the past and in the process created one of the stranger albums to come out in the early years of the Krautrock scene. While never really finding an audience outside of Northern Germany, SILBERBART nevertheless quickly gained a reputation as one of the loudest bands in the world for their brash proto-metal guitar stomps laced with fuzz and adrenalized distortion that were perfectly accented by a heavy percussive bombast and independent bass lines which accented the band's unique fascination with atonality between instruments.

SILBERBART recorded its one and only album 4 TIMES SOUND RAZING in April 1971 live in the studio and despite the intentions of only recording demos in reality was recording the four tracks that comprised the full-length debut. These experimental demons were based on the early 70s blues rock and heavy metal but found no problem in engaging in complete musical meltdowns, freeform nosedives into the farthest extremes of psychedelic trips and bizarre noise based chaos that generated atonal clusters of sound that were bound together sole by the rhythmic drive of the drums. I do believe SILBERBART actually prognosticated the New York based no wave movement of the late 70s but i somehow doubt that any of those bands could have been exposed to these stylistic deviations presented on 4 TIMES SOUND RAZING however the album did appear on the Nurse With Wound list in 1979 so who knows.

4 TIME SOUND RAZING has four goofily named tracks and although it begins like a typical blues inspired hard rock album of the era on the opening "Chub Chub Cherry," the band introduces oddball insertions into the status quo but don't really let the freak flags really fly until the second and longest track "Brain Brain" which at 16 minutes plus, begins as an airy falsetto driven slow atmospheric psychedelic groove that sounds like a throwback to the Summer of Love but then after a few verses and choruses totally freaks out at makes a hairpin spin into a high tempo chaotic swirl of bombastic noisy heavy metal that sounds like a herd of elephants stomping over a concert of rock musicians but the band regain control and channel it into a more familiar Amon Duul II styled Krautrock jam. The track continues to jump all over the place and reminds me a lot of Gnidrolog's debut album "In Spite of Harry's Toenail" which wouldn't be released for another year and in England. I think it's the atonal independence of the instruments that makes this connection. But then again Alice Cooper's debut "Hello Pretties" fits the bill as well.

The 10 minute "God" is more of a heavy psychedelic metal rocker and probably is the most "normal" sounding track but still goes left field into warm fuzzy guitar sequences, Ginger Baker sounding drums, Led Zeppelin-esque guitar solos with Guru Guru heavy feedback with freeform jamming added for good measure. While Teschner's vocals are fairly reserved on this album compared to the crazy instrumental workouts, at times as in the middle of "God" he hurls some blood curdling screams out of the speakers enough to scare the bejesus out of you the first time you encounter this sonic exorcism! The track then totally derails and starts to zigzag all over the place. The track ends with an assault of heavy guitar chords, bluesy slides and atonal riffs running amok.

"Head Tear of the Drunken Sun" ends the album and saves the weirdest for last! It immediately takes that honor as it enters with a series of ferocious guitar slides and then enters blues rock territory with Teschner doing his best Creedence Clearwater Revival vocal tribute. While the guitar riffs begin more like something off of Deep Purple's "In Rock" complete with sizzling guitar solos, it eventually breaks down into an ethereal Comus like freak folk with echoey clean guitars and spooky haunting sounds in tandem including what sounds like chimes or bells of some sort. The freakiness builds in intensity with guitar sounds sliding and whizzing like the LSD has kicked in. Is this Can's "Tago Mago?" Wow. Sure sounds like it but this is more metal oriented and one of the earliest examples of what could be truly called psychedelic metal which could rightfully be compared to the bizarre funeral metal antics of England's modern day Esoteric at least instrumentally speaking. After completely switching gears back into sober heavy rock, the track finishes in the bluesy rock style which it began with.

This is a wild ride for sure and utterly unique for its simultaneous intensity on two completely different levels. While many bands were pushing the heaviness and others were going full force into psychedelic, SILBERBART somehow found a way to incorporate both aspects into their sound without sounding forced. It really does sound like a band that went to practice but dropped some acid before the set however the lysergic influences only intermittently affect their playing and the result is 4 TIMES SOUND RAZING. Too weird for even the proggers of the era, this band didn't last long at all and broke up soon after. While remaining a complete mystery for decades, the 2012 reissue finally added some liner notes to give some important history. This is a must for any adventurous Krautheads who love both the heavy rock strains as well as the psychedelic trippy ones. You can think of this as the most psychedelic band that took the late 60s along for the ride and in many ways lives up to the potential of the sounds that were never fully realized by bands like Cream, Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly. This is a delicious and demented album but a ridiculously fun one at that!

4.5 stars but rounded down