Track Listing

1. De Luxe (Immer Wieder)
2. Walky-Talky
3. Monza (Rauf und Runter)
4. Notre Dame
5. Gollum
6. Kekse

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166092 in Music
• Released on: 2007-04-16
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import

Customer Reviews

Harmonia - 'Deluxe' (Universal)
I just had to go back and listen to this 1975 follow-up of Harmonia's 'Musik Von' (see my review) and have now discovered it's nearly as outstanding. 'Deluxe' most certainly displays some of Michael Rother's somewhat dominating guitar work, on a few tracks anyway. Starts off with the lp's title cut 'Deluxe' which reminds me of the 'Neu! 75' album but also lets you know what might've influenced the music on the first two Gary Numan lp's. "Walky Talky" is pretty decent with Guru Guru drummer Mani Neumeier as guest. "Monza" has the synth work over floating it's boundries. Chalk up another genius effort for the Rother, Moebius and Roedelius team. 'Deluxe' would best be described as 'experimental mind music'. Just gotta love these krautrock CD reissues.

SUBSTANTIAL ALBUM - TOP QUALITY REISSUE!
This very flowing,melodic,hypnotic second LP from Krautrock "supergroup" is
for me THE essential album of the Krautrock-genre- a very rewarding listen for fans of Neu! and Cluster as well as Can, Faust, Amon Düül II etc.
This 180g vinyl reissue on the label Lilith is made in Russia - but is in no way a dodgy pirate-release. The vinyl, mastering, cover etc is all of exceptional quality and is highly recommended!

Adventurous

The frantic period of creativity that produced so much startlingly daring music from Germany between the late sixties and mid-`70s was beginning to come to an end by 1975, but there were still a few truly great albums yet to appear. One of these is most definitely Harmonia's Deluxe. That Michael Rother was to appear on both this and NEU!'s excellent NEU! `75, probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone aware of his omnipresence on the Krautrock scene from the early part of that decade onwards.

Harmonia's superb 1974 debut Musik Von Harmonia had set a high standard for the group to follow with any subsequent work, and, as it had been such a boldly adventurous outing in the first place, it might have seemed they would have difficulty in showing any kind of musical progress from it on the album that followed. That they attempted to build on and develop the ideas from their first album - and the work done by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius in Cluster - says much for the talent and audacity of the men involved.

What we have here is an album made by three people very much at the top of their collective game. Much like Musik Von Harmonia, this album blends Moebius and Roedelius' pretty and adventurous synthesiser work with Rother's carefully created guitar lines. The title track unfolds over nearly ten minutes of pulsing electronic melodies, using slabs of Rother's treated guitar to emphasise - and contrast with - melodic keyboard progressions. However, unlike on the previous album, there are vocals here, a mantra-like repetition of "immer wieder rauf und runter / einmal drauf und einmal drunter / immer wieder hin und her / kreuz und quer mal leicht mal schwer", seeming to reiterate the almost childlike simplicity of the supporting keyboard melody. In fact, the lyrics themselves seem to compound this sense of simplicity, referring to repeated, simple movements such as going up and down stairs, or "one time over, one time under". But despite this, the subtle electronic rhythms and waves of synthesiser noise only add to the song's sweep, taking a relatively straightforward melody on some kind of intergalactic trip.

Another major difference to the band's debut album is the addition of a human drummer for some of the songs - Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru doing the honours - adding a different rhythmic sensibility to music that had hitherto been driven mainly by electronic beats. He plays a significant role on both `Walky-Talky' - where he plays a subtly repetitive supporting rhythm as minor key guitar figures, keyboards and harsh treated guitar riffs circle and interact around his musical anchor - and `Monza', where he plays in a style not dissimilar to NEU!'s Klaus Dinger. On this latter track, Harmonia sound as much like NEU! as they ever would, Neumeier attempting to mimic Dinger's famous `motorik' beat, and Rother playing his guitar in a way that is very reminiscent of his outings with NEU!. The main differences are the frequent squalls of synthesiser noise and the repeating of the lyrics from `Deluxe', albeit more in the style of a cheery singalong on this occasion.

The remainder of the album is more redolent of Musik Von Harmonia; driven largely by synths, sequencers and drum machines, it matches both the ambient beauty of the first album's best moments on `Notre Dame' and its airy spaciousness on `Gollum' (where Neumeier again adds understated and sympathetic support). The closing track, `Kekse' (`Biscuits'), is another very Cluster-ish moment; it starts with a typically pretty keyboard melody and a rhythm that seems like it was written by a five year old as additional layers of sound are added to it, and various squeaks and squawks bubble to the surface. These eventually subsume the melodies and allow the album to fade to its close in a muddle of running water and what sounds like the chirruping, croaking sounds of nature.

While this album doesn't quite match the inspiration of the first Harmonia album, it deserves to be applauded for the attempts that it makes to develop the band's musical palette - the addition of a human drummer for instance - and further efforts to make songs that sound like they are a true fusion of NEU! and Cluster's respective sounds, for me, it lacks the sense of wonder that seems to be present on Musik Von Harmonia. Having said that, this is an undeniably great and underrated album - as pretty much all the records made by Rother or Moebius and Roedelius around this time are - and as such deserves far more attention than it has ever received, because this level of musical adventure and invention doesn't come along very often.