Wednesday 30 September 2020

Steel Mill's Green Eyed God

 






I'm not so crazy about the music, which is too basic in the rock genre with some inventive ideas, blues passages, but very little original melodic or chordal progressiveness, but boy that cover painting is beautiful!  I remember reading it was commissioned from a legit German painter, which makes complete sense, you can make out the influence of S. Dali obviously. 

In most reviews online this music will be described as 'crazy psych' and I suppose that is definitely the most accurate description, though to me psych means absolutely nothing other than that perhaps there is guitar in it, since it has been applied to the most diverse albums from the Byrds' Turn Turn Turn all the way to Comus, which to me seems bona fide psychedelic, in the sense of LSD-influenced.  On that dial of utterly ordinary to utterly incomprehensibly demented music this album is squarely on the leftwards axis.

The song called Black Jewel of the Forest employs the Black Sabbath technique of minor second chord change (on top of E minor, of all tonics, the easiest one on the guitar! -- my kids could play this song btw) to give a doomy atmosphere, yawn; I mean, when Tony Iommi first discovered on his electric that playing E minor to F sounds really hellish and demon-like when played really loud, it must have been so (or soooo, as those millenials would text) exciting, until it was copied over and over again by lesser bands and guitarists:




If you're patient however (not my forte at all as my wife always loves to remind me) you'll find that 4 minutes through there is a great riff and a change to a more exciting passage, very much like B.S., but it quickly reverts to the annoying minor second change.





2 comments:

  1. https://www80.zippyshare.com/v/kWtQldbk/file.html

    https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/llmrl9

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  2. a forgotten gem for anyone into heavy prog :-)

    ReplyDelete