Poegs - The Frogressive Rock Sampler


Year of Release: 2001
Label: self-released
Catalog Number: 60:25
Format: CD
Total Time: 60:25:00

You have people who try to get the most interesting recording deal in their lives and you get some who don't have enough patience to wait and thus produce everything themselves. Hailing from the city of Osnabrueck in Germany, Christian Zumdick is part of the latter bunch, having released four albums under the pseudonym of Poegs already, Poegs being the northwest-german dialect for frog!

Christian divides his work into two major categories, one leaning towards new age and easy listening, the other containing a mixture of prog rock and psychedelic elements. He has also released two samplers, one featuring the new age music entitled The New Frogressive Age Sampler and the second, focusing on the prog rock pieces, entitled The Frogressive Rock Sampler.

Influenced by the likes of Nektar, Eloy, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, the main difficulty with these multi-instrumentalists is that they can confide all of their ideas to disc immediately without having to wait for someone's consent. That way they have no criticism until the actual product is released, so sometimes you get musical ideas that are way too long and should be severely shortened in order to keep the listener on his/her toes throughout. Take the otherwise nicely structured "Earthchild" as an example, where the main theme is repeated over and over again so it loses all of the initial magic. In "Spiral Nebula" I seem to detect some remains of the UK band Haze whereas "Through A Luminous Galaxy" sounds very spacey and dreamy, getting close to the music of the German synth school. The guitar melody kind reminds me of some of Mike Oldfield's early work blended with the relatively unknown french band Alpha Ralpha.

The fact that an artist is trying to deliver all of the goods automatically means he has also to supply the drum sound, which here, as in so many cases, is a piece of electronic wizardry which lacks the necessary feel to make "Meteor" something interesting. A fan of the illustrous e-guitar, Christian combines his love for the instrument together with his admiration for Neil Young during "A Youngish Place" again lacking the true dimension this song really needs. "Jailbird Blues" sounds like a demo for a cheap keyboard played during the yearly Christmas ball at a pensioners home. Sorry Christian but that's how it sounds.

Poegs is a nice result of "one-guy-in-his-bedroom" music and through MP3 of course there are no barriers into preventing this kind of music ever to be released. Furthermore Christian seems to have released quite a number of discs already in a very short span of time. All I could do to advise him is to be harder on himself and his compositions and why not try and get some extra musicians/ideas in to work on the arrangements. The ideas are there, now all he needs to do is to mould them into the result we are all waiting for.


Tracklisting:
Unbearable Emptyness (5:42) / Earthchild (6:16) / Spiral Nebula (4:15) / Through A Luminous Galaxy (7:19) / Meteor (5:43) / A Youngish Place (3:54) / Jailbird Blues (3:39) / Landscape (10:21) / The Blue Divide (4:52) / Transmigration Part 1 : Meeting Of The Grim Reaper (3:50) / Transmigration Part 2 : Mournful Fury (4:34)

Musicians:
Christian Zumdick - e-guitar, keyboards

Discography:
Transmigration (1999)
Black Hole (2000)
Galaxy (2000)
Landscape (2001)
Frogressive Rock Sampler (2001)
New Frogressive Age Sampler (2001)
In Somnius (2001)

Genre: Progressive Rock

Origin DE

Added: April 10th 2001
Reviewer: John "Bobo" Bollenberg

Artist website: www.poegs.de
Hits: 2021
Language: english

  

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