Andromeda
Andromeda

THE REVIEW

“Andromeda” is the only album released by the little-known British band of the same name, organized as a guitar/bass/drums trio, before splitting up for good at the twilight of 1969.

The genre is muscular and essential hard rock blues, dominated by John Cann’s frantic and impetuous guitar, who also handles the vocals. He would go on to do much better things right afterward with Atomic Rooster alongside the brilliant Vincent Crane.

Unfortunately, beyond the energy and directness, there are no other virtues among these eight songs (which are doubled, thanks to as many additional tracks, in the digital disc version): the melodies, riffs, and arrangements never rise above the ordinary, and the guitar solos are quite muddled, consisting of fiery dashes up and down the fretboard to catch as many notes as possible, sometimes even missing a few along the way. There’s not a single track, nor two, nor more, that stands out, that lingers in the memory, that in some way drags the rest into a more favorable judgement of the album.

This Italian label, Akarma, once did great work in recovering and reissuing a lot of music that was alternative at the time (they called it underground, I remember) released between the late sixties and early seventies. Those were the years of the psychedelic boom, which quickly evolved into progressive or into jazz rock, rock blues, folk blues… and sometimes all three genres mixed together.

Every now and then I took advantage of these Akarma releases to search for or revisit things I had missed from that rock season but, I have to say, I never once made a sensational discovery (or rediscovery), an epiphany, or the epochal recovery of a name that had lingered in my memory for decades and turned out to be truly worthy of deep appreciation.

Basically, I already knew and owned the truly great records from those years; Akarma helped introduce me to many others, but not a single one could measure up… Including this “Andromeda,” an honest but skippable hard rock album from the late sixties, whose most psychedelic aspect is ultimately in its cover art. The genuine and pioneering flavor of those formative years for rock is all here, but that's all there is.