CAROL OF HARVEST

You may have stumbled upon this album if you search prog or 70's rock oriented blogs. Carol of Harvest were a german band with a female singer, often categorized as krautrock (another missleading misconception that probabbly kept people off this gem). The truth is they played progressive folk rock, and they created magic with their music. As a band they only released a same titled album in 1978, in 2003 there was another release under this name, but there was only one original member involved and stylistically it had nothing to do with the original form of the band. The lp goes for crazy amounts of money (even 1.000$) but there's also a cd reissue you could somehow grab at a reasonable price. Honestly, I avoid listening to this album too many times, so that I preserve the magic for very special moments.

ABARAX- Blue room (2010)

ABARAX is a German band playing some sort of Pink Floyd inspired prog rock. Till now they have released two albums of which the second one presented here is the best. What we get here is a beautiful album of melodic, atmospheric and stretched out songs that set a nice mood. There's some early Scorpions influence in there too, especially in the vein of songs like Fly to the rainbow, epic ballads with a symphonic/pompous tone. The guitar adds some moments of magic, there are some really inspired solos going on in songs like Life, which you can check out below. Don't expect any jazzy wankery, the stuff is extremely melodic, harmonic and tranquil. It's just on the brink of being psychedelic, but I'm very cautious about using this term, it got a little bit misleading with all sorts of post rock/experimental/drone/shoegaze bands claiming to be psychedelic. Nostalgic and moody may describe it better, but is has the ''close your eyes and drift away'' effect for sure. You can check their interview on the 2nd issue of Lonely Road by downloading the pdf file on the right column of the blog.

Cool Feet- Burning desire (1976)

Extremely obscure album (it’s supposed to fetch many hundreds of dollars) by a bunch of German and British guys who were based in Luxemburg. Obviously influenced by early Scorpions, Cool Feet can be proud for managing to recreate part of the Germans’ magic, leaving behind some really good songs. You can easily detect the Scorpions influence even on the sexist album cover and furthermore ‘’Burning desire’’ was recorded at the Dieter Dirks studios in Cologne, Germany. Especially ‘’Fly to the rainbow’’ must have been one of their favorite albums at the time, The man from Marakesh sounds a lot like They need a million and Alone in your cage draws inspiration from symphonic anthems like Fly to the rainbow or Fly people fly. Despite the similarities one cannot underestimate the talent of Cool Feet, nor the great songs they contributed to rock history.