XHOL
Motherfucker GMBH & Co KG

THE REVIEW

I am Krauti and this is their third work recorded in 1970 but published in 1972, as the cover clearly states with the wording "2 Years Old," akin to a good DOC wine.

Again, the cover reflects the intention to simplify the group's name with the blatant (liberating?) erasure applied to the word "Caravan" associated with XHOL in previous works.

There are good reasons to consider them original and significant, in my opinion: firstly, I would say they are, perhaps, the only German band that happily blends Cosmic Music with the sounds of Rock and those of typically American Soul. This peculiarity is a legacy of previous works, where the presence of these sounds was filtered and treated in a somewhat irreverent, "Zappa-like" way.

This musical work travels on a straight highway lane towards a goal that only they pursue while, in the opposite direction, all their other colleagues travel; another good reason for consideration: courage. I can almost see them as they play and sing track 1, among others, "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and make faces at Sam & Dave while simultaneously winking at Zappa, who smiles under his mustache.

Track 2 is simpler and more linear; we are in the realm of electric jazz, but the parenthesis is short-lived; it is brief and serves only as a sorbet for the organ leap of track 3, cosmic and electric with the teachings of Stockhausen on one side, and on the other, the psychedelic contamination that in those years was perhaps impossible to avoid.

Track 4 - but wasn't I the one who wanted to refrain from writing about the individual tracks? - goes further, towards distorted sound experiments; it's music for lysergic journeys; it's as if the entire American musical world exploded in a great Big Bang and they randomly collected the musical fragments that came their way, without order, as if they played "Patterns" borrowed from other songs, transported them to the same key, and played them glued one after the other.

A sigh of relief, however, we manage to take with the 5th track; peace reigns supreme and a cricket reminds us that it's summer, evening, and warm; flute and percussion underline the heat and push us towards Mediterranean rhythmic territories.

Then everything closes, but does not close, with the last track, which forcefully throws us back to America, to the source of Rock, in the country of "American Graffiti" (Second LP, side A, Track 10, The Clovers, Love Potion No. 9 for the signatures of Leiber & Stoller), but the signs and the cars are different in that country, the small town has just been shaken by the passage of the Punk hurricane.

I said it is and isn't the last track because, at that point, if I tune the radio, I switch from Lupo Solitario back to Sam & Dave and thus start all over again until infinity.

Are they geniuses or have they fooled us? I like them a lot.