Spermull: No Freak Out

The future of Germanic rock and the world’s predilection for more experimental leaning combos might be drastically different if not for Ohr label honcho, Rolf Ulrich Kaiser and his sometimes blatantly duplicitous business dealings. After watching the continuation of some other worldly and problematic conduct, Bruno Wendel and Gunter Korber left Ohr to found Brain Records in 1971. While relatively unknown to the passing enthusiast, Brain would go on to release genre defining work by the likes of Neu!, Klaus Schulze, Guru Guru and some other folks. And while some of those efforts probably have ended up being relegated to a life of obscurity, a few have found a new light in this digital age.

Julian Cope’s never ending and some times troubling love of all rock related musics has led to his “Unsung Artist” feature on Head Heritage. The posts have resulted in the furious typing sound of his readers posting on a message board accompanying the feature. It’s amusing to reading Cope’s comments and the corresponding users of that board – most are useless regurgitations of beliefs by that Brit and don’t lend any sort of insight to the music, its sound or what it all means. But even in that, these messages, touching on esoteric and essentially useless acts, can propel some new interest in an band – Spermull, for one.

To an American audience the name alone might be problematic enough. And even once diving into this offering from Helmut Krieg (guitar, mandolin, vocals), Harald Kaiser (bass), Reinhold Breuer (drums) and Peter Schneider (keys) there isn’t as much to keep a listener hooked as some of the more robot inclined outings of the genre.

The lead off track to the self titled disc, “Me and My Girlfriend,” plays into that repeating fabric of music criticism with Cope and his blind followers echoing some specific Syd Barrett similarities. There are some – but any psych related band in ’73 had at least a tangential tie to Floyd. Regardless of that slight point, the remainder of the album is generally written of as blues tripe after the shadow of that first track has fallen west. But it’s not – again a grand simplicity coming from Cope’s minions.

There might not be too much on here to keep anyone’s rapt attention in focus, but surely more than a few moments subsequent to the first offering trump it. The drum solo from “Right Now,” which might not even be the highlight of that track, pushes past “Me and My Girlfriend” with a breezy ease. And as the organ kicks up again while the band moves into a pretty standard – if not Southern Rock sounding – conclusion to the track, fears of total mediocrity should be waylaid, for the moment at least.

Even if “Right Now” can move from a shambolic rock bracing to some jazzy keyboard solos, the rest of the disc comes off just as diverse.  “Rising Up,” for one, and its stunted guitar eases the simplicity from Spermull’s more pop oriented section of the song – and the disc overall. But even these summarily annotated descriptions can’t aptly describe sound. And neither can those message boards, so cop it well.