Forest - We Are Just Watching Time (Germany 1981)

Now look at that incredible cover, a drawing credited to Gabriel Herschdoerfer. I believe this is meant to be the controls of a nuclear power plant, based on the fact this is the year 1981. (Or it could be a wayne's world fantasy basement of a tv and stereo system on the wall, who knows.) In this year Ronald Reagan declared it's 'morning again in America' (I love the irony of those words) not realizing, with the hindsight we have today, that it really was the evening setting sun, with a last burst of colour and clarity closing in on the american dream in advance of a coming nightfall that we are just stumbling into now. This was the american century-- the century that oil built, just as this will be the century that oil destroys.

And yet, what a load of hope there was back then for the future, before aids, before the tylenol cyanide murders, before wall street masters of the universe, then the savings and loans scandals, before the moral majority, before global warming broke big, before Iran-Contra, Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, before the Berlin Wall fell, before apple and home computers, before the first Bush and the Iraqi wars, long long before napster ...

Here's a really rare private pressing from Germany with some really nice rough hardish rock, just a few touches of raw punkness, referring to Iggy Pop or presaging the proto-alternative of the northeast late eighties, powered by the twin guitars of songwriters Bodo Gross and Manfred Mletzko. Germany was truly an inexhaustible mine of good rock and jazz in the seventies. Will we ever get to the bottom of it? I really doubt it, for social rather than any other reasons...

8th of March:


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