A harder and heavier Eloy than you usually expect
BENJAMIN MILER | Veneta, Oregon | 05/16/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This self-entitled 1971 album, originally released on Philips (their only album on this label, as all their following albums up to 1984's Metromania were on Harvest) is the debut album from Eloy, and it's often ignored in light of their following albums. Here Frank Bornemann sticks to guitar, while Manfred Wieczorke (who you usually associate with keyboards) sticks to guitar and additional vocals, plus bassist Wolfgang Stöcker, vocalist/organist Erich Schriver, and drummer Helmut Draht. Well, you know right away this isn't Ocean or Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes, it isn't even Inside or Floating, this is Eloy from the very beginning, a hard and heavy group that has more in common with the likes of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath than of Pink Floyd (and any other numerous prog rock bands of the time). Frank Bornemann doesn't even sing here, most of the vocal duties are from Schriever. Many of the songs have lots of guitar solos like "Today" and "Something Yellow", but even the prog elements do creep up on this album. The lyrics have a left-wing political bent, and it was the political bent of the album that Frank Bornemann wasn't happy with, he didn't feel music and politics should mix, so all the following albums of course had sci-fi themes. In fact he felt Erich Schriever was a "singing politician" while Bornemann thought himself as a "singing musician and songwriter". It's little wonder why this version of Eloy didn't last, although Bornemann, Stöcker, and Wieczorke did stay together long enough to record their first fully progressive album, Inside.
That being said, this debut is actually excellent and is nowhere as bad as many make it out to be. Frank Bornemann would probably rather forget this album ever existed (although he does acknowledge this era in interviews), and subsequent versions of the band never performed anything off this album. I guess the reason for that was because the band's sound changed so much that performing music from this album would seem very out of place. Sorta like imagining the Gabriel/Hackett/Collins/Banks/Rutherford (1970-75) version of Genesis performing stuff from From Genesis to Revelation, since that band also moved on to bigger and better things by that point. Detractors often thought the garbage can lid cover pretty much described the music, but for me, it's a great hard rock album. Frank Bornemann did not hide the fact he was big on the likes of Purple, Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Sabbath, Tull, and Colosseum at the time, so of course, a lot of those influences popped up in the music.
As mentioned already, the original LP was released on Philips, and has became the most difficult Eloy title to get if you were to acquire the LP, but Second Battle in Germany had reissued this on CD.
This is one of those albums that are pretty much an anomaly in their catalog, sounding very little like what they would do later. So if you're not expecting another Inside or Floating, but an excellent hard rock album in the Sabbath/Purple/Heep vein, you'll be safe."
Track Listings (6) - Disc #1
