FREE LOVE: Apocalypse

Cover	Release	Style
	2006	psychedelic rock
	Label
	http://www.musearecords.com/
	Website
	http://www35.tiki.ne.jp/~apocalypse
	Contact
	-
	Playing Time	Cat. N°
	60:38	MP 3054.AR
	Review by	Rating
	Daniëlla	7/10
nederlands	Review
The debut album from the Japanese “Free Love” starts a bit risky: a remake of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”. It’s a good thing the cd mentioned it because it was unrecognizable at first: Psychedelic, lots of synthesizer, jamming guitars, … Catchy, but it doesn’t quite sound like “Kashmir” until the fourth minute or so, when they start to sing. From that moment onward, the song was rather troublesome to listen to, considering the lyrics and the abrupt ending. The second track: the instrumental “Spiral” only starts to get going near the end with an excellent drum solo and a nice finale. “Kami-no Chishiki” is something completely different: lovely, harmonic, soft and tender until it gets psychedelic again, with a vibrating voice that you need to get used to, and some nice synthesizer playing: a special combination with an ending that reminded me of Sid Vicious’ “My Way”. “Island”: it sounds like something from the 60’s, but, for me, the voice was rather irritating at times. The music however is pretty good if you like psychedelic rock. “Maze of Psycho” starts with a drum solo and gets accompanied after a while by a freaky guitar, to end up with vocals I really don’t like. The ending was once again quite impressive though. The next track “Umi-No-Koe” starts gently with some guitar and synthesizer accompanied with soft drums. The song continuous like this, till, around the 5th minute, it goes down another road: the synthesizer gets stronger, the guitar is fast and it’s sounds like pure guitar rock, until it gets somewhat nervous and stops with an abrupt ending. Strange song! “Shangri-La” starts a bit oriental and continues with some rather impressive guitar playing, sounds really like “Led Zeppelin”, but those awful vocals… Luckily there’s an excellent part with bass and guitar in a sparkling, tempting dance, forming a trio with the drums and you can enjoy this enchanting love game for several minutes. The vocals come up again but luckily they’re very harmonic this time and it sounds quite a lot like “Led Zeppelin” again, nice! The dance starts to speed up, is going faster and faster until it, finally, collapse, wow! Conclusion: quite a special debut album. You can hear the overwhelming influence from bands like “Led Zeppelin” and “Deep Purple”: the preference of hard rock and psychedelic rock, but it sounds strange at times, especially with the vocals. The instrument are handled quite professional however. The last song was in my opinion the best one.
Musicians
Hiroki Matsui: synthesiser Atsushi Motohashi: drums Hiroaki Shibata: vocals, guitars Ai Tatuya: bass, vocals
Tracklist
“Kashmir” (5:47) “Spiral” (7:42) “Kami-no Chishiki” (5:47) “Island” (6:13) “Maze Of Psycho” (9:34) “Umi-no Koe” (6:48) “Shangri-la” (18:57)


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