Well, at least we know someone had their ears to their ground when over-driven lummox rock like Vanilla Fudge and Sir Lord Baltimore’s Kingdom Come had made the rounds a few years before this monstrous tome was released. All the way from the former West Germany came this lineup of yahoos who were about as far removed from the spacey communal Krautrock scene as possible. One thing I’m really surprised about is, across the board, how much people seem to dig this album. I go the other way – there is something about this experience which makes me nauseous, which is odd, because normally this kind of music is in the ballpark with stuff I normally listen to. But TBS cranks everything to such incredulous levels – especially song lengths – that about the only thing they succeed in doing here is tiring me out. There is a grand total of five tracks here and not one of them runs less than five minutes, but for me, they all seem like they run twice as long. Plus, the lead singer has a thick accent which gives his vocals a rather strange effect that I find annoying. Like if Leslie West had a really bad cold, tried to sing with food stuffed in his mouth, and English was not his first language, either. Nothing here is even remotely close to being original, but then again, these guys just want to rock out, thick and HEAVY – which I do not have a problem with. But when your template is the overwrought metal-meets-organ dirges of Vanilla Fudge, as it is on “These Days”, or the admittedly hilarious but still third-rate over-driven chicanery of Sir Lord Baltimore (“Tiger Rock”, which starts with actual tiger roars), I start to view you with suspicion. It improves somewhat on the next couple of tracks (“Everything I Need”, “To Hell”, which features a rather muddled spoken-word section), but those are obscured by far longer run times and the same issues affecting everything else here – feigned outrageousness and unnecessary repetition. “Tiger Blues” finishes this thing off with another overlong exercise, this one in the blues realm, and then the tiger roar comes on again at the very end. Thank God. And that cover. It’s like Arnold Horshack took too much acid and thought he was a rock star. The 70’s were great for music but horrible for imagery. Avoid.
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