JERONIMO

Jeronimo a heavy psych/hard rock band from Germany and their second album selftitled from 1971 from their short career. This is an excellent heavy psych album with hard rock arrangements dominated by Michael Koch guitar and impressive bass chops from Gunnar Schäfer. I really like it alot, is very enjoyble with plenty of memorable passages, all pieces has balls delivering top notch performance. For that period early '70 Jeronimo had some prolific live performance touring with Deep Purple or Golden Earring, being one of the most well known german band from that period. This selftitled album offers good hard rock riffing, excellent bass lines like on Silence of the night, simply excellent bass here and good vocal passages, very much fiting in the music offered. Quite lesser known today even all 3 albums were released on CD, this one comes in a very nice brown colored digipack issued by Second battle label in late '90's. Solid sound, good compositions from this trio, nice ideas, what else an album to have in your collection, I like what I've heared here a lot and because of that 4 stars easy, for sure their best album from the 3 released before disbanding in late 1972. They had a brief reunion in 2001 but gone unnoticed by larger public. Recommended a nice slice of heavy psych meets hard rock.

I had never heard of Jeronimo (the band) until a few years back when they showed up on a compilation video of proto-metal bands. Once I finally got an album on CD, I was surprised to read in the liner notes that this band had been at the top of the German charts and a hit across Europe back in the day. Seriously, I had never heard of this band!

Although Jeronimo seem to have been labeled as a progressive rock band, there's nothing on this, their second album, that hints of progressive rock. This is a solid hard rock/early heavy metal album. In fact, among all the proto- metal bands to release albums (or at least record albums and have them released a couple of decades later), Jeronimo's self-titled sophomore belongs in the upper half of the heavy hitters. The guitar sound is not really distorted but still sounds pretty wicked when hit up for some heavy power chords. The drumming hammers hard but still has grace. The bass in some tracks is really quite outstanding. Lead vocals are shared by two of the members, one a little higher register and the other more standard guitar rock vocals.

Most of the tracks on this album rock out pretty hard and heavy. "Shades", "How I'd Love to Be Home", and "End of Our Time" are excellent early metal tracks. "Silence of the Night" has a really cool bass line but sadly the rhythm guitar is kept back in the mix a little. "Reminiscensis" is a short acoustic guitar instrumental, and "You Know I Do" is a kind of straight forward groovy rocker about a guy trying to get a girl.

As with so many albums from this time, there is an obligatory drum solo track. "Hugudila" begins with the full band in full swing but soon the drum solo begins. It's good enough as it is but there are just so many drum solo tracks from this period that hearing yet another is enough to roll one's eyes. The only good news is that this drum solo includes a kettle drum bit, so there's that as a surprise.

The final track here, "Save Our Souls - S.O.S." has the same band sound but the recording sounds warmer than the rest of the album. It's also more of a power chord rocker than most of the other tracks. It seems to be about the band calling out to their fans to help keep the band alive. There's a kind of funny line that says, "When Lucifer's Friend eats your bread," and I can't help but wonder if Jeronimo were worried about losing fans to fellow-German band, Lucifer's Friend. "When we are sure / We're getting older/ Ideas are dying / We are trying / To keep us young / So we are crying". Well, they did manage one more album, their third, after this.

If you're looking for progressive rock, keep moving along, there's nothing to hear here. But for a good, solid rocker that in a way reminds me of Wolfmother's debut but without the keyboards, then this is a good place to lend your ears.