Floating, drifting, boring
Artiste: Eloy
Nationality: German
Album: Floating
Year: 1974
Label: Harvest
Genre: Progressive Rock
Tracks
Floating
The light from deep darkness
Castle in the air
Plastic girl
Madhouse
Chronological position: Third album.
Familiarity: “Performance”, “Metromania”
Interesting Factoid: The name “Eloy” comes from the name of a race in HG Wells' “The time machine”.
Impression: Gimme an “M”. Gimme an “E”. Gimme a “H”. Sigh.
Best track(s): Nothing really. All a bit boring and monotonous.
Plastic girl is ok, but only that. Things get a little more animated and rockish for the closer
Madhouse which is also not bad, but it's a bit late by then...
Worst track(s):As above. Meh.
Intention: Hope their later stuff, other than what I'm already familiar with, is better than this.
Comments: I've always considered Eloy --- what I've heard of them anyway --- to be more towards the harder side of progressive rock, while still never coming close to anything that could be considered progressive metal, but they have more of an edge to their music that makes it somehow more immediate, more forceful. I came across Eloy off the back of bands like Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator, and was initially surprised at how heavy they sounded, to me, at the time. Of course, those albums were their later ones, released in the mid-eighties. This is a little more laidback, more what you'd expect from a seventies prog band: lots of organ noodling, long instrumental passages and songs with grandiose titles. There are only five tracks on this album, but yet it's just barely over forty minutes long. The longest track is the second one, “The light from deep darkness”, at just over fourteen and a half minutes. I have to say though, in general, I find myself getting bored with this album: it just seems to wander all over the place, without any real idea of where it's going or what it's trying to achieve. Luckily Eloy got it together later and put out some pretty fine prog rock albums. I don't consider this one though.