Tuesday 17 October 2017

Cosmos Factory - An Old Castle of Transylvania (1973)


The debut album from this Japanese band.

The band was a quartet with a lineup of bass, drums, percussion, guitars, mellotron, synths, keyboards and English vocals.
A guest musician provided violin on one track.

Cosmos Factory released four albums between 1973 and 1977. I got their first three albums and will review them in the coming weeks/you can find the reviews of these albums somewhere else in this blog.

Most Japanese bands sounds a bit weird to our Anglo-Euro-American ears. The Japanese prog rock scene had it's own sound. Mostly due to the non-masculine vocals. That is not a derigatory comment. I am really fond of the Japanese sound and prog rock scene. They add a lot of quality and colours to the world prog rock scene and albums.

An Old Castle Of Transylvania is a colourful album. Take psych rock and add a lot of krautrock in the vein of Eloy and Jane. Other references are Vanilla Fudge, Uriah Heep and Pink Floyd.

The music are mostly in the krautrock vein though and that is not a bad thing. Only the vocals gives the game away.

The music is mostly played with mellotron and keyboards. This is indeed a vintage keyboard's fantatics wildest dream. So if you are a fan of vintage keyboards, get this album.

The title track is a twenty minutes long suite. A good suite. The other tracks on this forty minutes long album is also good. In short, this album deserves to be checked out and to be cherished by the scene. Which it already is...

3 points



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