Harmonia

Deluxe - 1975

The product of a veritable Krautrock supergroup comprising members of Neu! and Cluster, Harmonia's Deluxe was an LP that all but redefined a genre. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. The band's debut Music Von Harmonia was a triumph, if not necessarily a landmark. Ever present were the hypnotic overlapping grooves that had become commonplace within Cluster, while the whole set was moored in Michael Rother's subtly psychedelic flourishes of guitar and keys that float atop Neu!'s motoric pulse. But rather than illustrate the contributions of its members and the specific talents that each brought to the proceedings, Music Von Harmonia was a concentrated group effort. An exercise in the awesome power of subtlety. What makes Deluxe such a tremendous LP is not in the way that they followed this fomula, but in how they managed to amplify it. Understated, yet epic, Deluxe is simultaneously one of Krautrock's most grandiose statements and its most restrained. While the most immediate difference from its predecessor is its more prominent use of vocals, the greasy synths and soaring lines of guitar (often processed to sound like a synths themselves) elevate every track into a majestic statement - never as clean as Kraftwerk, not nearly as funky as Can, but dripping with an inexplicable level of human emotion and utter happiness that neither band could touch. A monumental achievement and a truly joyful listen.