Search - Ash Ra Tempel :: Seven Up

Oh man! What a trip.....

Cartimand | Hampshire, UK. | 09/02/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This rather strange collaboration with drugs guru Timothy Leary has been dismissed by some as overly gimmicky and not up to usual Ash Ra Tempel standards. It does, in my humble opinion, still have much to offer though.



Downtown opens the proceedings in funky, bluesy style and shows how this legendary band could effectively traverse genres at the drop of a hat. Power Drive and Right Hand Lover sound like almost conventional pop/rock songs (albeit with most unconventional lyrical themes!) with Gottsching showing he can rock it with the best of 'em when he wants to, before Velvet Genes gives us a more abstract Krautrock-ish intro that soon metamorphoses back into some blues riffs before reprising Downtown. The long track Time, which covered the whole of the second side of the original album, returns to the classic Ash Ra Tempel 'kosmische' sound, reprising the seminal chord-sequence first heard on Schwingungen, but with the Timothy Leary voiceover. As a great example of beautiful, trippy, ambient, hypnotic mood-changing music, I like it. Lots.



This is, perhaps, not the best album to listen to as an introduction to this most mercurial of bands (better to go for Schwingungen, Join Inn or the eponymous first album), but is still a very worthwhile effort and highly recommended."