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jsREVIEW:
I can only imagine how weird it would have been to be an avant garde band in Hamburg, Michigan during the early ’80s. I suspect, first of all, that the Inserts were not just an avant garde band, but rather THE avant garde band of 1983.
Sounding heavily influenced by the No Pussyfooting collaboration between Eno and Fripp, this quartet plays mostly guitar synthesizers (and note explicitly that there aren’t any keyboard synthesizers on the album), with a Rhodes for a touch of jazz fusion.
From tracking down Marc Taras, who is thanked in the credits and now works at local shop PJ’s Records, the main halmark of the band was its spontaneous and improvisational nature. They’d roar into the studio, start the tapes and jam, splicing anything that worked back together post hoc. Rather than ending up disjointed, the album feels spacious and anxious with broad washes of taut guitar tones playing over jittery post-punk bass work.
Clean and “modern” sounding, there’s a fairly dystopic sci-fi sound to the ordeal, like Vangelis’s Blade Runner without the plot. Still, for fans of bands like Cluster, Eno & Fripp, or even Psychic TV, there’s a lot to love about The Inserts, and you’ll never see this disc for sale again.
(Having learned that one of the members of the band, then going by birth name Mark Murrell, is now WCBN DJ Ed Special, look to this space once Cousins Vinyl can get him to talk about the album!)
jsREVIEW:
Aside from the obvious East-West divide, ’70s Germany also seemed to (at least to my American ears) have a significant divide in their art rock.
On the one side, there’re bands like Can or Faust, the druggy, woozy titans of Krautrock, which didn’t sound so much Teutonic as otherworldly.
Then there were the more terrestrial (though sometimes just as spacey) bands like Grobschnitt, Popul Vuh and Trimverat, who played music that had more of a rock influence to it.
Of these, Triumverat is probably the one that would fit in easiest with prog bands from around the world, occassionally to their detriment. Sometimes derided for similarities to ELP, mostly because of the instumental line-up (Jurgen Fritz’s keyboards are the main attraction), the comparisons are a bit unfair. First off, Triumverat really sounds closer to a hybrid of The Who (”This Song Is Over”) and Yes, and second because the songwriting is brighter, more adroit and less ponderous.
While the album is technically only two songs long, each has been broken into suites, and the 2003 remaster included radio edits (as if to show how easily these could have been pop hits). The addition, for this album, of Cologne Opera House strings and the Kurt Edelhagen Brass Band gives a welcome depth and allows more of the Moog virtuosity to shine through.
When listening to the album, and noting the strong, clean compositional strength, it’s a bit of a wonder that Triumverat never really cracked through to the level they should have. Maybe there was just too much other prog at the time for them to be noticed. Not so anymore— this album is a great addition to any prog library.
