CHECKPOINT CHARLIE-FRUHLING DER KRUPPEL, LP, 1978, GERMANY

Here's my pick for the choicest manifestation of the German Polit-Rock scene of the 70's. With an eight year span between their debut "Gruss Gott Mit Hellam Klang" and this follow-up, it's unsurprising that some musical evolution would have occurred, but there's little in their violently amusical and relentlessly text-intensive early work to suggest the sophistication their work would ultimately acquire. The feel here is closer in spirit to the arch satirical output of Floh De Cologne than their more well known contemporaries from this period in Ton Steine Scherben, with a sound that seems to take a page from Floh De Cologne's Fleissbandbaby's Beat Show, only they've folded it into a paper airplane and sent it sailing off to to a much more muscially extended and sometimes acidic place, the jams at their heaviest here taking on aspects of krautrock contemporaries Alkatraz and French space rockers NYL.
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