Colour Haze
Ewige Blumenkraft

I stumbled upon Colour Haze almost by chance, during one of those solitary and endless car journeys that sometimes come very close to a mystical-lysergic experience: they give you the chance to think, to offer the last remnants of your alveolar youth in sacrifice to the god Marlboro, and above all, to extend your perceptive abilities.

Without even realizing it, I found myself swimming upstream with their discography, going against the current that had suddenly crossed my path, causing me to swerve, at the time of the release of "Los Sounds De Krauts" ('03). And that's how I came across "Ewige Blumenkraft."

Released in 2001, "The Eternal Power of Flowers" is the fifth album in the long career of the Munich trio, led by the massive guitarist Stefan Koglek. Perhaps not THEIR masterpiece, but certainly a beautiful album that, in some ways, serves as a watershed between what the band delivered in the first phase of their career and more recent productions. The main path, in fact, is still that of high-voltage stoner, but by now it is increasingly easy to lose orientation among hinted jam-like digressions and prog-psychedelic sighs: songs like clods of a rocky terrain, made of enormous guitars, crackling valve distortions, rough and red-hot, which nonetheless prove to be the ideal humus for the sprouting of instrumental riffs destined to reshape and "blur" the song form. The purely stoner roots, still always in the forefront ("Goddess", "Freakshow"), can then unfold, stretch into timid and unexpected branches of smoky atmospheres ("Refeer"), hypnotic, almost intimate ("Smile 1").

Stefan's voice, now sweet and whispered, now hoarse, deep and hardened by the German accent, marries melodies infused with a sort of "latent vigor" that swell and enlarge as if caught by the high tide, to form music that, in some episodes, seems to want to sit in a corner biting its nails before getting up and starting to scream ("Outside"). It happens that, alongside seventies grooves, brief bass and drum duets ("Smile 2") and unabashedly catchy refrains ("Almost Gone"), the orphans of the Kyussian asteroid can rediscover that same electric mysticism that echoed in the Sky Valley, in an evocative and enchanting guitar crescendo, permeated with poetic sadness, as crepuscular as a love story gone wrong ("House Of Rushammon").

In the closing "Elektrohash" (from which Koglek will take the name for his record label), the sonic wall of the trio definitively crumbles: in just under twenty minutes, built on an apparently "square" drum beat, the distortions are willingly seduced by a sort of pervasive "Hendrixian spirituality," softened by psychedelic auras, dilated by wah wah games, and crumbled until they become ethereal, intangible. They seem to grow, stop, start again and regain their solidity.

"Ewige Blumenkraft" perhaps has the only flaw of having been a precursor to that "Los Sounds De Krauts" which, in my opinion, still today represents the pinnacle of the band's production. It's an excellent, powerful, and romantic album. A splendid rehearsal for a masterpiece.