V/A 
968667
CD
TURN CENTURY TURN 1

CONTEMPORARY INST. (GUITAR)

This is a crossover album in the sense that it will appeal to fans that like music from our guitar, psychedelic/space-rock fusion, and Euro-rock/contemporary departments. It is an AMAZING album that features all-exclusive tracks by an artist list that’s a quality 'who's who' when it comes to the aforementioned genres. This album is a firm favourite here and certainly one of our top five Euro-Rock albums of 1999. Anyone into the styles or the groups mentioned throughout this review should really try this album, because music in this genre doesn't come much better than the samples that are on this CD. Featured bands are: Chameleon, Ektroverde, Alien Planetscapes, Zen, Chateau De Fleurs, F/i, Volcano The Bear, Tangle Edge, Escapade, Timbra Komal, Iron Bong, Beyond-O-Matic and the Holy River Family Band.

 

Opening the all-instrumental album, are Chameleon with a near seven minute slice of melodic but exciting, psychedelic flavoured electric guitar 'jamming' type of track with some spiralling and heated electric guitar work above a loose and solid rhythm section and there's an emotional quality to the playing that puts it fairly and squarely up there with a more UK oriented Grateful Dead/Quicksilver West Coast style only with more bite and structure but excellent melodic quotient... A stunning start to the album, for sure and one that will appeal to a wide range of guitar fans from Ash Ra Tempel only cleaner, via West Coast, to Zappa. Next up are Circle offshoot band Ektroverde with a short piece that mixes Czukay - style, decelerated electric bass lines with flowing flute work, echoed bass and backed by percussives in a kind of Sandy Bull vein, pretty hypnotic in a stripped down early Can vein. One of our very favourite bands Alien Planetscapes give us five minutes of strident Krautrock-meets-space rock with guitars and synths flying, diving and surging over driving rhythms, phenomenal bass work, again a bit Can-like, and a gloriously psychedelic mix that gives the impression of a huge wall of sound and yet the complete musical panorama drives effortlessly forward in a multi-tracked electric guitar-led glory on what is a powerful and absolutely spellbinding track. Turkish band Zen take their Can predilections into new waters with a touch of Mooney-style voice (and I mean just a touch - about two bursts of 30-60 seconds worth) and some atmospheric rhythm work from electric bass and drums, while occasional guitar lines and shaken percussion fill the foreground, and it's the sort of track that's not immediate but the more you play the album, the more it makes sense. Chateau De Fleurs play two and a half minutes of semi-wailing moog backed by cascading bass, stumbling drums, tasty percussives and synth fills, ending in a more intense cocktail as the synths are layered and the drums boom out while the moog lead signs off. Things take an even bigger leap forward when F/i steam in with nearly six minutes of driving space-rock with early Hawk/Gong-styled echoed voices buried deep in the mix are initially placed on top of a solid bouncing moog bass, electric bass and drums rhythm, with Dettmar-esque synth fills 'a la 'Silver Machine' take a lot of background space and a brief Hawkwind influenced vocal passage emerges, slightly higher in the mix and adding to the hypnotic quality of the mid-paced power of the primarily electronic-sounding track, guitars either absent or well mixed among the synths and rhythms. The group that has breathed new life into the Krautrock genre, Escapade, are featured with a relatively short track (for them - nearly six minutes) that has more superb electric bass work and excellent drums, very much in the vein of  'You Doo Right'-ear Can, over which synth choirs and atmospheric synth fills provide the heart of the track with a fantastic echoed lead guitar line coming in for the final couple of minutes as the track fades out - could have done with another twenty minutes of THAT one. Volcano The Bear provide five minutes of fractured guitar leads and scorching layers of guitar and feedback over train-like rhythm base and the whole thing intensifies to the point of bursting as the searing guitars reach a heady climax, with a surprise right at the end. The ever-consistent Tangle Edge do the album's longest track, at just over ten minutes, and it's one of their best instrumental offerings in a long, long time with some smoking, melodic and high-flying electric guitar work over a full-sounding backing from solid, tight and flowing electric bass/ drums plus a distant electronic backdrop filling any gaps, all making for one classic guitar-dominated jam style track that is as close to perfect as you'll get. Following this come three shorter tracks from Timbra Komal (acoustic/electric guitars and keys over African flavoured drums/percussion), Iron Bong (the album's quirky track - four minutes of blipped, cascading synth lines, distant voices, undulating electric bass and an almost Hillage-like echo-guitar line spiralling above the rest), Beyond-O-Matic (a typically strange space-rock offering with cross-stereo effects, cyclical keys, heady guitars and an Eastern feel over the booming, bouncing rhythms) finally ending on a near seven minute track from Holy River Family Band, better than anything on their last double album and back to the instrumental eloquence of the first album as restrained electric guitars and a whole range of synth/keys give it all very much of a late '60's/mid-'70's Grateful Dead feel only with more electronic backdrops, stronger rhythm base and some red hot electric guitar work... which, I seem to remember, is where we came in.

Weight: 150.00 g