TANZ DER GÖTTER

When I saw the FLAMING BESS debut album cover with a beautiful Baroque style painting and a pompous name as "Tanz der Götter" (The Dance of the Gods), I imagined a pompous and Classical oriented album, so bought it immediately. Even when I was wrong, the music is extremely peasant and well elaborate, even though it's obvious that the German band wrote and composed a transitional album between flamboyant Symphonic Prog and a more commercial form of Neo Prog, something that could be expected in 1979.

"Tanz der Götter" is opened by "Bedrohung" (Threat) a track that starts with a spoken intro describing the story of FLAMING BESS, until this point I was expecting something pompous, maybe in the style of RICK WAKEMAN, but the music turned into a keyboard oriented song supported by an excellent guitar and drums, that flows gently (but not boring) from start to end. Some people say this song sounds like CAMEL, but I don't agree, because this music doesn't make me want to sleep (Sorry to CAMEL fans, but that's my opinion.

Around the middle and after an acoustic guitar solo (Well, semi-solo because you can hear the organ in the background), the keyboards lost the lead and allows an aggressive and SANTANA like guitar to take us to Rock territory, with excellent bass. Not the most complex music but extremely good.

"Kampf & Vertreibung" (Fight and Expulsion) also starts with a narration (My German is too rusty to understand it completely) with a nice and soft piano in the background, but after a short silence and a strong drum passage (sounds a bit like a drum machine, but pretty good), the track changes into a jazzy guitar and keyboard driven music, which despite being fast and vibrant, is also very fluid and coherent. Again at the end the distorted guitar takes the lead.

"Oasis" is much more jazzier than all the previous tracks, and even when it's too soft for my taste, I can't deny that the guitar work is amazing, sadly by this point the music begins to get extremely predictable, because the following track "Arkana" is more of the same, fluid composition but completely lack of surprises or radical changes.

The album is closed by "Tanz der Götter" a track that starts very experimental with a weird synth solo, but after a couple minutes, the formula they've been using from the first minute of the album is repeated, honestly by this point I lost all the interest.

Before I started to work in the review, I was ready to rate "Tanz der Götter" with three stars, but while writing, noticed that I had given that qualification to ELP's interesting debut which despite some minor flaws, reveals a band trying to be adventurous. On the other hand FLSAMING BESS takes a safe path, nice and catchy music but boring after the first 15 minutes when the listener discovers they have nothing new to offer and even worst, that they are not ready to take risks, so cant give more than two stars to this good album with absolutely predictable music.