Lock the door, switch the light - you'll be so afraid tonight

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

11/04/71 : Death Walks Behind You - Atomic Rooster

So who expected us to see two albums from Atomic Rooster this year? Last time I was pleasantly surprised - here's hoping for more of the same.

Yeah, I quite liked this despite it not really being my sort of thing. It's "heavy prog" with some serious guitar and Hammond organ riffs, with some proper skills on display. It acts as a nice bridge between prog and rock and it makes me somewhat surprised that Atomic Rooster aren't really talked about these days - maybe it's a longevity thing? In this guise anyway, because the band are still going, but all the people who played on this album are no longer with us - if you like a bit of Deep Purple or Led Zep and aren't aware of this, then maybe check it out.

We're at #12 in the charts this week on their third week of a seven week run with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Motown Chartbusters Vol 5 (a new entry), Andy Williams, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull with the next highest new entry being The Nice (#6).

Wikipedia tells us it's their second album and is "commonly thought of as the archetypal Atomic Rooster album" - the only other fact of interest is that the album cover is the "William Blake monotype Nebuchadnezzar". I obviously had no idea what a monotype was, so had to look it up to find out the artist paints on a non-absorbent surface such as glass, metal or plastic and then transfers the design onto paper, so it can only be done once. There's no word on critical reviews at the time, but retrospectively AllMusic gave it 4.5 stars but the Rolling Stone Record Guide gave it one star (and I can't even begin to imagine what caused that) - commercially it did best here but got to #13 in Australia, #44 in Canada and #90 in the US.

discogs.com tells us this is one of the more expensive albums we've seen this year, with a decent original copy setting you back £20 (CD reissue copies are available for less, but that's cheating) and if you want a mint copy then you can expect to pay up to £260. All in all, this was a surprisingly enjoyable visit - it's of its time but you can hear quite a few people have borrowed the ideas over the years.

18/04/71 - Interesting but flawed

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