Abacus - Abacus 1971

The band formed in 1971 made their breakthrough at the Germersheim rock festival, where ABACUS drew not less applause from the 300,000 visitors than PINK FLOYD, SANTANA or ELP which appeared on stage as well. Jürgen Wimpelberg takes on himself to play keyboards, guitars, drum programming as well as vocals. Abacus' 1971 debut is arguably the best thing they ever did; while later albums have since been met with the progressive community's dismissal or ambivalence, the self-titled debut has found itself a comfortable niche in the prog rock canon. Like Van der Graaf Generator, Emerson Lake & Palmer and their lesser-known contemporaries in Aardvark, Abacus sought to bring keyboards to the front of an otherwise guitar-dominated style of music. To current ears Abacus at their best sound like they're fusing symphonic prog and Krautrock, and that's all the more of a reason to feel disappointed that this self-titled debut fails to live up to its potential. While the first pair of tracks are very solid, cloying songwriting ultimately prevails, leaving the album feeling much less effective than it should have been.It's a fairly common point of weakness for debuts, but Abacus end up feeling like they mean to cover as much ground as possible, rather than focusing in on their strongest suits. No doubt the band wanted to get all of their best ideas pressed to record so as to make the best first impression with listeners, but it's resulted in an album that suffers the lack of consistency and coherence. "Pipedream Revisited" is a strong mini-epic that highlights a pastoral atmosphere in their sound, and the excellent organ-based instrumental piece "Cappucino" follows it up nicely. If a brash take on symphonic prog pulls them one way, it's the pop stylings of the past decade that pull them back the other. "Don't Beat So On The Horses" fares decently with the melodic, hook-oriented approach, but everything from the Sitar-infused raga track "Song for Brunhilde" onwards feels half-baked in comparison. It's not the idea of fusing the two styles together that makes the album so uneven, it's the varying extents of success they've had with the different approaches that does it.

Line-up / Musicians

Felix Hans/drums,percussion
Charlie Schade/guitar
Chris Barutzky/keyboards
Chris Williams/vocals
Konstantin Bommarius/drums,percussion

Discography(Album)

Abacus 1971

1.Pipedream Revisited Part I & II
2.Cappucino
3.Don't Beat So On The Horses
4.Song For Brunhilde
5.Song For John And Yoko
6.Radbod Blues
7.Chestholder


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