Album title: Faust
Artist: Faust
Nationality: German
Label: Polydor
Chronology: Debut
Grade: B
The Trollheart Factor: 1
Tracklisting: Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?/ Meadow Meal/ Miss Fortune
Comments: Krautrock and I have a fractious relationship, to say the least. It’s not quite the same as the one I have with Yes - I love some of their stuff but am unmoved by a lot of it - or indeed Zeuhl - hate that pretty much - but it’s definitely not my genre of choice. I think I recall listening to a Faust album - possibly
Faust IV - but I can’t remember what I thought of it. This is their debut and has, as you can see, only three tracks, but as you might expect, they’re all long ones. In fairness, not epics: one is eight minutes, one is nine and one is sixteen, so only just over the half-hour in total. A half-hour that will flow by quickly or one that will seem like four hours? Let’s see.
The opener, the oddly-titled “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?” comes in slowly but then bursts into a cloud of feedback and sound effects, kind of sounds like someone tuning a radio for a minute or so. Then a soft piano takes over, turning into a kind of ragtime piece for a moment, joined then by a synth line and some military-style drums. Odd vocal effects take over completely now as the music drops out entirely (unless the vox are made on a synth, which they could be) and now back it comes, dragging a sax with it this time. Has a strange kind of almost chanting feel about it, and then there’s a sort of choir going, some more effects - it’s krautrock, ya know? Them crazy Germans, how funny they are. Spacey music and effects is followed by what sounds like people speaking in low voices.
The second, and already penultimate, track is called “Meadow Meal” and also fades in slowly with a whole lot of sounds and effects and trickery, puts me in mind of standing at the dockside watching cargo ships being offloaded - no more meadow than the surface of the moon to be honest, but on we go. Discordant piano coming in withs some sort of echo, marching percussion, weird sounds on top of weird sounds, with an extra side of weird, then an acoustic guitar as someone talks, shouts, recites, does some damn thing and a ship’s foghorn sounds. Surprisingly, this appears to be in English, what little lyric there is of it. Bit of a boogie breakout now, and a nice church organ melody right at the end. Went in quickly enough for its length, but made about zero impression on me.
The longest, and final track, “Miss Fortune”, opens with a ringing bass I think and some percussion, again a lot of the idea of marching in the rhythm, and definitely a sense of slowly building up to something. I would definitely say this is the far more musical, so far anyway, of the three tracks, with some good warpy guitar and organ, and a nice bass line humming through it all. Of course, it’s sixteen minutes long, so I expect it will divert into the crazy soon. But it’s nice to hear until it does. Now we’re dropping back to just bass, then a single buzzing note, bass coming back in and rising before a buzzy synth joins in with a howl, one cymbal tapping, which is no doubt going to turn into a full… oh. No, it didn’t. In fact we have total silence for a few seconds until a soft plucked guitar and piano take the tune and now there are chanted vocals.
And basically on it goes, weirding here, weirding there, becoming less weird for a while, then weirding it up bigstyle. Some nice music when it settles down but as ever, not my particular cup of cyanide. Not sure I’ll ever really appreciate Krautrock. Probably just to remain nodding acquaintances for the foreseeable.
Favourite track(s): None
Least favourite track(s):
Personal Rating: 2.0
Legacy Rating: 4.0
Final Rating: 3.0