Der Neue Planet - Schwerkraft für Anfänger (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | YouTube

This third album from Cologne's Der Neue Planet came to me as stoner rock, which is certainly one element of its sound, but it reaches a long way beyond it. The titles mostly suggest space rock, an obvious element from the opening synth drone. However, there's also plenty of post-rock in play, along with prog, psych, krautrock and other genres. At points, there are hints of surf music and a few soft backdrops that remind of lounge, for harder sounds in the foreground to contrast with.

I should explain those titles, because they're all in German, this being entirely instrumental music with no lyrics. The album title translates to Gravity for Beginners, which suggests that we're in the presence of those who might live without it but are coming to visit. That's not a bad way to look at the music within it.

The unwieldy Unendlicher Unwahrscheinlichkeitsdrive translates to Infinite Improbability Drive, a device in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which suggests that this track can and absolutely should go absolutely everywhere. It doesn't, perhaps inevitably, but it does go to a lot of different places. Instabile Weiße Zwerge meaning Unstable White Dwarfs, which is ironic as this piece has a section that's as close to traditional classic rock as anything else here. Galaktisch. Praktisch. Gut. or Galactic. Practical. Good. is less obvious in its intent, but it's a positive piece.

Phobos and Deimos, of course, are the moons of Mars, but they're brief interludes here that serve no other purpose because they're almost empty. If you listen to them in isolation you'll wonder as to where they were. Alpha Ursae Minoris is the star usually known as Polaris, the Pole Star or the North Star, a particularly useful star in navigation, at least in the northern hemisphere. That may suggest that it's the guide to this album, a notion backed up by the fact that it's at the very heart of it, being track four of seven, and the fact that it's the longest piece here at almost ten minutes. Does everything here appear in this one in microcosm? No, I don't think so, but it does seem to try.

That just leaves Lirum Larum Lapidarium, which isn't entirely Latin. A lapidarium is a repository of stones, usually with historical meaning, but I have no idea what the rest of the title means. Maybe that's why it's the most experimental piece here, starting out with soft, resonant acoustic guitar but ending as pure krautrock. All in all, these tracks make for quite the journey, but it isn't merely one journey, as so many psychedelic rock albums are, with each track continuing in the same vein as the rest; these are each individual pieces of music with individual goals, tones and moods.

While Unendlicher Unwahrscheinlichkeitsdrive ought to be the most varied, it may need to battle Alpha Ursae Minoris for that crown and everything else except the interludes might want a word too. It has the benefit of coming first to nail its claim into our skulls, though, and it's the one that delves into surf pop and soft psychedelia before finding some heavier stoner rock. Even though it plays light at points, it's Instabile Weiße Zwerge that feels like light is a motif. Sure, it builds too, as all of these songs do to various degrees, moving from soft to heavy or at least heavier, but it's positive in nature, as if these white dwarfs are still delivering light, however inconsistently.

Alpha Ursae Minoris takes that and runs with it. This is the one with the lounge-like backdrop for the pulsing bass and jagged riffs to dance all over. It's a delightful contrast, as if liquid is meeting rock, perhaps for the first time. Of course, the rock abides, however playful it gets and it gets very playful over nine minutes and change. Galaktisch. Praktisch. Gut. may well be my favourite piece of all, once again lighter early and heavier late, but even more so, reminding of west African highlife early and finding a sassy seventies hard rock groove in the second half.

There are many grooves on Lirum Larum Lapidarium, from the soft opening through arguably the most overt stoner rock, albeit with funky breaks, to the krautrock towards the end. It's maybe the least consistent in how it shifts between grooves, some of them layering tastily but others feeling more jagged and less effective. Sure, this stoner rock groove benefits from that keyboard groove being played over it, but that groove shifts to another without warning and we're taken aback.

I haven't heard Der Neue Planet before, but they have two prior albums out, Magrathea Erwacht, another Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy nod, and Area Fifty-Fun, from 2018 and 2022 respectively. It's abidingly clear that I should seek those out sharpish.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - The Silver Cord (2023)

Country: Australia
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Oct 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I blinked again. I believe I've reviewed more albums by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard than any other artist, this being my fifth, but, every time I find a new one, I realise too that I missed a host more. My previous review was of Omnium Gatherum, which came out last April but they released Made in Timeland earlier in 2022 and Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, Laminated Denim and Changes after it, plus PetroDragonic Apocalypse earlier this year, whose seven tracks apparently serve as the yin to the yang of the seven others here. I can't keep up.

What's more, this album boasts two CDs, each featuring the same songs but with greatly different lengths. The regular album runs a mere twenty-eight minutes, making it rather short for anything by this band, but the other runs close to ninety, every one of these three to four minute songs over ten in their extended versions and the opener, Theia, over twenty. As you might expect, the short versions are snappier and more commercial and the extended mixes are more immersive. Oddly, the tracks on that earlier 2023 album add up to forty-eight minutes so it's an off balance yin/yang whichever way we look at it.

I haven't heard PetroDragonic Apocalypse, but it appears to be another metal album, following in the footsteps of Infest the Rats' Nest in 2019. This absolutely isn't, because it's electronica, though none of the components we think of as being associated with pop music make it so. This is still rock music, even if it's full of pop elements and comparisons will highlight that. For instance, Set is such electronica beats that it feels like house music when it starts out, with a tone right out of the new wave era and a lively attitude that's all seventies funk. Somehow, though, it ends up more like the Prodigy than any of the names you might expect, except perhaps Steven Wilson. He shouldn't be a particular surprise. The Prodigy only become more overt on Gilgamesh.

Notably, there are no actual guitars on this album, if I'm reading the credits right. However, there are plenty of guitar synthesisers. Similarly, I don't believe there are any actual drums, at least in the traditional sense, but there are electronic drums and drum machines. In fact, the core sound for the album stems from drummer Michael Cavanagh's impulse buy of a Simmons electronic drum kit. Fellow band member Joey Walker has said that "as soon as he plugged it in, I thought, 'That's the sound of the album right there."

What all that means is that hard beats are replaced by pulses and riffs are played on synthesisers rather than guitars, five of the six regular band members credited on synths of varied description, only Michael Cavanagh excluded because he's dedicated to electronic drums. Even then, two of his bandmates also have credits for drum machine. However, there are still beats and riffs and this is generally structured like rock music, most obviously a combination of prog and psychedelic, with a lot of Hawkwind in the effects but John Kongos in the drive of Chang'e and Yes in the vocal melody in Extinction.

I've been a fan of electronic rock music for decades, but this doesn't sound like any of the artists I listened to back in the eighties, like Tomita, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. The latter are likely to be the closest comparison in that world, because they evolved substantially over the decades and became just as important to clubgoers dancing to the beats as those of us who sat in big venues to listen carefully to the depth of the music. However, I'm far less familiar with that era of their sound so I can't offer any comparisons. What I can say is that the Tangerine Dream influence is far more clear on the extended mixes with their long instrumental sections.

This is a fascinating album for me, because it's not remotely like anything I usually listen to, most obviously in the heavily manipulated vocals on the title track, but it is a King Gizzard album, so it's hardly unusual for it to be something completely different. That's kind of what they do. This is just new territory again for them and me. I'm not particularly sold on the short version of the album, not because it's all poppy electronica but because everything about it is so short. Every time they get a groove going, it's over to make way for the next track.

Personally, I'm far more into the longer version with the extended mixes, because the band are able to truly get their teeth into these vibes. I found more influences leaping out on these mixes too. I didn't hear Pink Floyd on the short version of the title track, for instance, but they're there on the twelve minute extended mix. And so, for rock and metal fans, especially those who perhaps found King Gizzard through PetroDragonic Apocalypse, this is definitely one for the open minded, but then that's kind of required for King Gizzard fans.

Shem - III (2023)

Country: Germany
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Apr 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Prog Archives

You know someone's not aching for commercial acceptance when they call themselves a collective of musicians performing improvisational sound pieces and then kick off their third album with an instrumental piece of droning space rock that lasts for sixteen minutes. It's called Paragate and it finds its groove quickly, with drones underneath and space rock chirps over the top. Gradually the bass makes itself more obvious and it moves into a more traditional space rock mode as it speeds up. It ends more like Hawkwind than it begins. It begins like krautrock, which is probably the most effective way to look at this.

We could easily call Paragate a test, because less open minded listeners aren't going to make it to the second song and that's probably fine, because this isn't for them. Anyone who does will find a song of an altogether different length, Lamentum not even making it to three minutes but doing what it does just as well as Paragate did over sixteen. That bass, courtesy of Tobias Brendel, finds its purpose easiest here; even though it only has a five note refrain, it provides the melody that's crucial to the piece, until the vocals show up to serve as a counter. There are no lyrics here, just an instrument that happens to be a human voice.

There's a Tangerine Dream vibe to these pieces that seems counter-intuitive, given that this is an actual band playing the usual instruments we expect a rock band to play: guitars, bass and drums, along with synthesiser work from Alexander Meese. Tangerine Dream weren't always just synths, but that tends to be how we think of them, and Shem try to achieve the same thing here that they did in the early seventies, as they shifted from purely experimental mode into the unlikely success of the Virgin years. Refugium, the twelve minute soundscape that wraps up the album is the most like Tangerine Dream, merely framed as a post-rock band.

In many ways, Refugium is a combination of the first two songs. It's pure soundscape, built on the sounds of space rock, but a long way from Hawkwind. The vocal here is buried so far behind any of the instruments that we wonder if it's actually a vocal. Again, it's all vocalisations rather than any attempt to deliver lyrics, but it could easily be a musical instrument mimicking a voice. For all I can be sure, it could even be a sample, but I'd guess at one of these musicians in the studio. That bass makes its presence known again, even though it's almost submerged under the synths, and it has an even more stronger focus on drones.

In between is my favourite piece of music, which is Restlicht. It's much longer than the short song and much shorter than the long songs, but that still leaves seven and a half minutes for it to build. It's a stalker of a piece that finds a new influence that I wasn't expecting in the slightest. Often, it sounds like listening to the Bad Seeds without Nick Cave's voice ever joining in. It drifts further to krautrock as it goes, finding an almost industrial texture five minutes in. It plays with intensity at this point, testing how intense something intense stays if it stays intense, if that makes any sense at all. Contrasts are difficult when we don't move from one thing to another. This is almost asking us to contrast what it does with everything else we know.

And there's some of this in Refugium too, which makes it all the more appropriate piece to wrap up the album, somehow more of an epic than the opener, even though it's four minutes shorter. It has the bigger build, for sure, and it's more of a journey. There are moments late on where we almost end up in a guitar solo, but Alexander Gallagher resists the urge to get that traditional. There's an industrial feel here too, but one generated by bass and drums rather than synths, so it plays out in a very different way.

I can totally buy into this being improvised music, but music probably improvised on themes that a band of musicians already had in mind. As such, it feels loose but also focused, because everyone's working from a common inspiration. I liked this on a first listen, even though that daunting sixteen minute opener is my least favourite track here. However, I like it all the more on further listens. It's fascinating music, even if it is improvised, and I'm eager to check out those previous two albums, II, as you might expect, in 2021, and before that, The Hill AC in 2018.

AUA - I Don't Want It Darker (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: New Wave/Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 4 Sep 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's a new debut album that got under my skin that's a little hard to describe, from a Leipzig duo known as AUA, which is presumably an acronym for something I'm blissfully unaware.

I'm listing them as psychedelic rock, which is true as anything else, especially given that listening to this on repeat might just induce a trance state, but it's a little misleading. Their core sound is British new wave, located somewhere in the transition between the end of Joy Division and the beginning of New Order. The disinterested vocals remind a little of Ian Curtis, though they're less of a focal point, more like the Cocteau Twins at their most textured, and the drums on the title track are right out of Joy Division too, but the keyboards are too perky, pushing them into the New Order era.

And the keyboards are really important here, taking the place of the guitars in a rock band, so much so that there are easy comparisons to krautrock and its electronic descendants. Instrumental pieces like Starstruck clearly have Tangerine Dream somewhere in their ancestry but at a distance because they're shorter and poppier and interested in hooks rather than themes. I'm not immersed enough in the history of German electronica to viably suggest comparisons but it's all warmer and more organic than Kraftwerk yet more grounded in the old school than any more modern genre of dance music that I've heard.

The result is a fascinating one for me. My brain tells me that the relentlessly perky beat of Coke Diet shouldn't be applicable to either ethereal vocals or guitar fuzz, but somehow it all works. Some of the synthwork reminded me of Vangelis and that couldn't help remind me in turn that, while I enjoy his solo work immensely, adding Jon Anderson to the mix created something new. Albedo 0.39 and The Friends of Mr. Cairo are utterly different albums, even if they're grounded in the same keyboardist. This feels like that, as if this was a parallel universe collaboration between Vangelis and, say, Damon Albarn of Blur, that took from both their styles but created something else entirely.

It helps that AUA constantly bring in new sounds as they deem fit. No Treatment trawls in surf guitar and that puts us into the sort of bizarre indie territory that I remember from the Dark Night of the Soul album by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. The whole album would be a good companion piece but I'm especially remembering the title track with echoey backing and a distorted vocal from David Lynch.

Lynch comes to mind in another sense, because this could easily be a soundtrack, even the tracks with vocals. The question becomes what sort of movie would feature such a soundtrack. It would have to be European and independent, dark themed and a little off the wall. But, if Lynch was ever exiled to the continent the way Orson Welles was and he put together a cult retro science fiction tale set in West Berlin, this album would be knocking on his door demanding to be included.

As you might imagine from my words thus far, there's a lot to absorb here. Taken as a whole, it's not like anything I've heard before and I live to say things like that. However, there are so many moments that spark memories of other artists and bands. That's a Kings of the Wild Frontier-era Adam and the Ants beat, but that pulse is quintessential Pink Floyd. Often they come together, like on the closer, Umami Karoshi, which combines an old school Bauhaus beat, a Repo Man Iggy Pop bass line and a Nothingface-era Voivod vocal, along with a frickin' theremin for good measure. How's that for a mix?

The two gentlemen behind AUA, whatever it stands for, are Henrik Eichmann and Fabian Bremer and I can't help but wonder what else they've done. It wouldn't surprise me if they each knock out a dozen albums a year in wildly different styles. Let's go see!

Elder - Omens (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

Elder's roots are heavy enough that they have a page on Metal Archives, but their sound has been evolving with every release, this fifth studio release being no exception. Sure, it features the usual handful of long tracks with long instrumental passages, only one wrapping up within ten minutes and that only by seven seconds. However, there's very little metal to be found at all this time out, just the occasional power chords and crunchy guitar.

And while I've labeled it psychedelic rock, fairly I think, this ventures so far into prog rock and even krautrock that it's highly genre fluid. It will appeal as much to seventies prog rock fans who have never heard Elder before as stoner metal fans who have followed them throughout. The most obvious nod to that old fanbase is the vocals, but they're frankly starting to seem out of place in the soundscapes that the band are now conjuring up.

Maybe I'm spoiled after last year's generous EP, The Gold & Silver Sessions. It was entirely instrumental and much quieter than Elder usually play, as a sort of challenge to do something different. It seems to have taken, because this gets as close to that EP in style as it does to the band's earlier and more traditional stoner/doom albums. And, while I didn't dislike the vocals of Nicholas DiSalvo at all, they're easily my least favourite aspect here, even though they show up a lot less often than they could.

What tended to happen here, especially as the album ran on, was that I'd get lost in the music, only for his voice to bring me back to a firm realisation that I was listening to a song again. For instance, on Halcyon, we're almost six fabulous minutes in before we get any words and they're a little jarring at that point. Of course, this is a concept album that looks at the lifespan of an entire civilisation so there have be lyrics somewhere or we won't get any of that.

One part of this change towards krautrock soundscapes is surely partly due to the addition of a lot more keyboards. On the previous full length album, 2017's Reflections of a Floating World, Elder were a trio, but, since then, they've added Michael Risberg to the band on guitar and keyboards. Also, on this album, they've brought in multi-instrumentalist Fabio Cuomo as a guest and his work is known for its experimentation with prog and jazz. These new musicians are all over this album from moment one, which is synths only for over half a minute and rarely without them ongoing.

I like this album a lot and, frankly, while I enjoy earlier Elder, I enjoy this more. I think this is a good and natural musical evolution for them and they're ably equipped to move into this sort of territory. I've always liked the overlap between psych and prog and krautrock is a fabulous place to work in that territory, especially when it doesn't get over-experimental.

What's more, I'd suggest that the quieter and more introspective material on offer here works better than the louder, more overt songs. The first couple of tracks, Omens and In Procession, have a heavier mindset, even if they're reticent to remain there throughout. Halcyon lessens that and becomes neatly immersive, while Embers and One Light Retreating continue in that vein all the way home, making the last thirty-five minutes even better than the first twenty.