Search - Grobschnitt :: Ballermann

This 1974 album foreshadows Grobschnitt's later symphonic prog style (featured on Rockpommel's Land ), but also has a hard rock element. The studio version of the legendary Solar Music suite is also featured on this album and has an improvisational and unstructured air to it. The album starts off with an extremely bizarre, incomprehensible monologue by someone with a heavy German accent. This basically sets the tone for Grobschnitt's cheesy humor that pervades the rest of this album as well as their other work. The first five songs are great, with some tasteful guitar playing and beautiful piano and keyboards. Much of the music reminds of Nektar, in that it has a lot of keyboards, but there is a significant guitar presence, which lends a hard rock feel. This is very melodic and there are moments of high-flying dual guitar soloing that are totally great. After the first half of fairly structured music comes the intense Solar Music , which is delivered here in two parts. The intense jamming and soloing on this piece coupled with the more vocally-oriented stuff from the first half of the album makes Ballermann a winner.

For the digital remastering for CD in late summer 2008 Eroc pulled out all stops to reanimate old time feelings and to point out the sound details of each song in the best possible way. It was a pleasure for him to finally assemble Magic Train and Solar Music the way they were supposed to be 34 years ago.