Jack Ellister
Lichtpyramide

Apparently this Jack is sitting on the outer edges of the great psychedelic cosmos crafting wired and weird kaleidoscopic classics that gets the occasional airplay on BBC radio by Stuart Macoine or Nick Luscombe. The new album called Lichtpyramide focuses on the kosmische/kraut, cosmic/herb is what it is apparently. The language is mostly German to keep that krautrock feel, but we also get songs in Polish and English. When reading about this album I get the sense that it is a pretty interesting album that should appeal to me as psychedelia, prog and cosmic stuff interest me and I usually like that stuff – but the cover doesn’t give good vibes, does it?

And the cover might be correct, though it sounds interesting at first it turns less interesting pretty fast. The album is varied and composed of shorter musical stories and fragments, some sketches, and somewhere it loses the direction and gets lost up the authors ass, or some other dark and unpleasant place. The soundscapes are decent in their own separate entity, the structure of the album is not good and it feels way too long despite a playing time of 44 minutes. The vocals, though in a fascinating style due to the use of different languages, are pretty unimportant to the whole story and are often forgettable. It kind of feels like Ellister has thought up the songs at the spot and just recorded them in the order they came and the result is pretty dismal.

This was supposed to be cosmic music free from borders and genre preconceptions, I don’t know if I see it that way. It doesn’t seem too loose and adventurous and the label also claims that the tracks transition without interruptions to create the feel of a continuous journey through various areas of a continuously changing metaphorical landscape – in what way does it do that? It feels like a collection of fragments not particularly connected or well put together into an album that doesn’t have any kind of flow. I feel that the experience is constantly interrupted by elements that just sounds wrong. Granted, I am not an expert in the herbal music but I can’t really see who should not be appalled by the dreariness of this album.

Maybe it is a good try, maybe someone even likes it, but to me it feels like a pointless exercise and to release it on an LP is a waste of resources, both the electricity in the studio and the material to press the vinyl copies and packing to those. The best you can do is to ignore this one, it isn’t exciting, and it isn’t good, it isn’t worth your time. The promo CD is now in the garbage going to be burned to create some heating in the winter, so at least there was one good use for it.

HHHHHHH