c/o Gabor Kleinbloesem, Strutter’zine, NL

The German band SHAMALL has a long history, but in short it learns that it started in the early 1970s when a young NORBERT KRÜLER began listening to the records of LED ZEPPELIN, JIMI HENDRIX, PINK FLOYD and those of German Krautrockbands. He started training to learn and play the songs of his new ‘heroes’ by himself and during the 1970s he got involved in the German rockscene and eventually when he started to record own material in the mid/late 1980s, the SHAMALL band or project was born.

He achieved quite some success throughout the 30+ years of activity now and Schizophrenia is the most recent album, which is already his 15th! He does almost everything on his own (vocals, guitars, piano, organ, keys, bass, programming), but is also assisted by guitarist MATTHIAS MEHRTENS and on a few songs we can hear ANKE ULLRICH as lead singer, while she provides backing vocals on most of the other songs.

It’s quite a journey which is spread on 2 full-length CDs, but thankfully we get to hear lovely typical German semi-instrumental/vocal music that fits somewhere between Progressive Rock, 80s New Age/Wave, Synthwave and Electronic Music. You might also call SHAMALL a pure Krautrockband in the classic tradition of bands like TANGERINE DREAM, KLAUS SCHULZE, CAN, ELOY, GROBSCHNITT and so on. It’s not only synth/keyboard dominated, because there are also soaring proggy guitars slipping through (just listen to the beautiful Thoughts pt. 1) and the vocals are those of Norbert, with Anke here and there, making it an enjoyable adventure all together to listen to these 2 CDs.

It’s definitely high quality music we get to hear and despite I mentioned earlier on that this is a Krautrock affair, PINK FLOYD and PORCUPINE TREE similarities are also very clearly hearable. Highlights are hard to mention, because the whole album is sounding excellent, but the lengthy titletrack, World of emotions, The inconvenient pt. 1, On the run (lovely keyboardwork) and the 3 wonderful female fronted songs (Supernatural dream, We are all in the same boat and Eyes of a stranger) are definitely quite sensational in this genre. Kraut/Progfans absolutely need to check it out at: www.shamall.com