UFO

's debut album shows why the band, even if it never reached the levels of appreciation and influence the likes of or did, still maintained a healthy reputation over the moons for its early work. Opening number has a quite appropriate title for a starting track -- it is wonderfully tripped out, to be sure, and if was more of a guitar god, kicks up a lot of frazzled noise. The principle of the / rhythm section seems to have been "find loud weird grooves and then play them, sometimes chaotically." Again, they aren't 's wickedly effective combination of and , but they're not just falling over themselves either. The title track is the most memorable song, almost entirely eschewing conventional rhythm for an inward collapse of feedback and noise that sounds either like the ' even more strung out or early Main with a conventional band lineup. (a classic example of a just-groansome enough pun that only Germans seemed to love) makes for a good combination, the increasing freakiness of the one leading into the start-stop chug and explosion of the latter. really gets to show off a bit on both, demonstrating that there is such a thing as technical ability that doesn't equal pointless fret abuse. is actually the most conventional of the tracks -- while a good-enough slow burn up to a freakout (mostly provided by 's drum solo), it's too short to be truly epic and not otherwise distinguishable from many similar songs by the likes of , say. For all that, though, it ends this enjoyable effort well enough. ~ Ned Raggett