Warthur Deliberately made in a rougher, looser style in a bid to translate their live energy to the studio, Nektar's ...Sounds Like This may be jarring if you're coming to it from their more symphonically-inclined works like Remember the Future or Recycled, but makes perfect sense as a continuation of their early space rock/heavy psych-influenced sound. It's a style which may have felt a little dated in 1973 - an era when prog was largely pushing past its roots in psychedelic rock - but I think it's a perfectly solid entry in Nektar's discography and doesn't to be overlooked to the extent that it is.

siLLy puPPy More of an impromptu recording than a proper album, NEKTAR followed up its first two albums with a radical new approach. While the first two albums excelled in crafting psychedelic space rock with heavier prog workouts, the band’s third release …SOUNDS LIKE THIS was created to showcase a more stripped down approach that focused on simple compositions that were designed for lengthy jamming sessions. The idea was to capture the spirit of NEKTAR’s live shows without the unpredictable results of recording a live album’s worth of material. Basically recorded live in the studio in front of a small group of friends, the material was mined from songs that were written long before the album’s recording and had been played live for a few years.

This must’ve been a real shock for NEKTAR fans during the day after two stellar prog albums that focused on tight-knit lengthy composiitons with alternating trippy psychedelic space rock along with heavier prog rock complexities. Sort of going the way of Uriah Heep that delivered a few proggy albums before jumping on the hard rock bandwagon, …SOUNDS LIKE THIS delivered fairly basic hard rock songs that focused on extended improvisational jams. The album was recorded live in a single session and to be honest it really sounds like it. Sounding more like an early garage rock band of the 60s that started to dabble in the world of proto-prog, this third release was originally a double album which featured nine tracks at nearly 75 minutes playing time.

The album starts out poorly with “Good Day” and immediately establishes the band as a rather dumbed down version of itself with repetitive guitar riffing with some funk styles added and the occasional guitar soloing. Sounds of folk, country rock and the occasional space rock finds their way into the overall mix. After two albums of extremely brilliant instrumental interplay that didn’t miss a beat, all of a sudden NEKTAR sounded sloppy as if they all woke up one morning and went right to the studio to record this album. The overall impression it leaves me is that if this was what they sounded like live then i would’ve felt ripped off. The album is filled with moments that just rub me the wrong way. An ill-fated attempt of throwing The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” into the opening track just sounds plain awful. The track “1-2-3-4” sounds like a stupid nursery rhyme set to hard rock only with the skillset of a grade school troupe.

By the time the second album begins it gets even worse with tracks like “A Day In The Life Of A Preacher” sounding like a harder rock version of The Grateful Dead. Roy Albrighton’s vocals which sounded crisp and in top form on the brilliant earlier albums suddenly sounds strained and tired. And this is for the album’s long and tiring entirety. If the band’s intent was to sound as awful as they possibly could then they truly succeeded as to my ears i find little redeeming value on …SOUNDS LIKE THIS. While the 70s delivered some of the best hard rock ever to have been recorded, the songs on this album just sound plain boring and lack any characteristics that make them memorable or even tolerable. This was a decisive album upon its release and remains so to this day with yours truly falling on the side that finds this album rather torturous.

I listen to this from time to time just to see if there’s something i’ve been missing but every time i give this album a chance to sink in in some positive way, i’m literally bored to tears and find this to be one of the most non-innovative and generic hard rock albums of the entire 70s. None of the musicians excel in any particular way and the entire album feels like its forced. Add to that the production and mixing resulted in a heavier than expected sound effect and it all sounds so unstructured that there’s really no backbone to the album. A single album’s worth would’ve been bad enough but to extend this to four sides of a vinyl LP adds insult to injury. At least bands like Uriah Heep crafted beautiful hard rock albums after their early prog years but that’s not the case with NEKTAR. To my ears this sounds like a long lost NEKTAR album that was recorded way before the brilliant debut “Journey To The Centre Of The Eye” almost like a demo. Ironically the album cover is my favorite of their entire canon but i only get a 1 star enjoyment value out of this. For fans and collectors only. I keep this in my collection really for the eye candy album cover art alone.

voila_la_scorie Nektar had already released two distinctive albums, the space rock / psychedelic concept piece "Journey to the Centre of the Eye" and the heavy psych / proto-metal / prog near masterpiece "A Tab in the Ocean". Their success in their adopted country of Germany was growing and opportunity came for them to reach out to an audience in their native land of Great Britain. With material already in place for what was to become their breakthrough album in the U.S., "Remember the Future", Nektar went ahead to record this intermediate album in order to first launch themselves into the U.K.

The plan was simple: record live in the studio and release a double disc of material. And this is exactly what they did, playing in studio as they would live. However, in the course of their creative growth, this album comes across as a giant leap backwards. The songs barely give any hint of what the band was capable of with regards to carefully crafted longer compositions or short but tightly-connected conceptually related songs. This album was more like a hail to the good old days of fun guitar rock.

Perhaps Nektar saw this as their last chance to record some of their "old" favourites that had never been committed to vinyl. Songs like "New Day Dawning", "Do You Believe in Magic", and "Good Day" had already been recorded on what were called "The Boston Tapes" back in 1970 (later to be released on the bonus disc for "Remember the Future" on the Purple Pyramid reissue of that album). Back in those days, the band was pretty much just another guitar-based rock band with an organist in the line-up. The songs on this, their third album, are more or less in the same mould, despite three tracks being over 12 minutes and two of those coming in three parts.

With this in mind, you can expect exactly what you'll get: a double disc of rock songs with some good melodies and some parts showcasing the guitarist's abilities, some enjoyable heavy guitar workouts and some rather lengthy jam sessions. This album resembles "A Tab in the Ocean" only in sound (Nektar "Sounds Like This" is an appropriate title in so far as "sound" is concerned); the guitar and keyboard settings are more or less the same, though very different on "Remember the Future".

This is not to say that a fan of early 70's heavy guitar / organ rock will be disappointed. In particular, "A Day in the Life of a Preacher" and "Oddysee" exhibit some heavy rock jamming that fits in with contemporary Uriah Heep and Deep Purple. "Cast Your Fate" and "Do You Believe in Magic" also have their heavy moments. But for the most part you have to think of these longer tracks as four to five-minute songs filled with a live jam session. Notably, "1-2-3-4" is just a short song, which can be heard as just that on the radio edit on the Purple Pyramid bonus disc, but gets an additional 10 minutes of jamming, featuring solos on guitar, organ, and bass on the album. Yes, there's a drum solo coming, too; it's on "Oddysee".

The recording quality of the album suffers a little in my opinion because of the live-in-studio approach (that's "live" as in rhymes with "five"). The band wanted to capture that live feeling and I think they did and rather well at times, but I am not much of a fan of live recordings. This album is not mixed cleanly. There are no overdubs or efforts to make it sound like a studio recording. It's live with no audience except whoever was working in the studio at the time. I admit, this might make it more appealing to some. The Purple Pyramid bonus disc includes a studio radio version of "Do You Believe in Magic" and for me, this version is much more enjoyable, even though the album version includes a heavy guitar solo section completely separate from the actual song. The sound of the radio version is polished and cleaner compared to the live-in-studio version.

This album is said to be Nektar's heaviest and I have to agree based on what I have heard ("Tab", "Remember" and "Recycled"). I think it's because of the energy they put into their live set and the extended guitar workouts that they sound heavier than usual on this particular album. What fails to impress me, however, is that these songs are often allowed to carry on as a live performance where, if you are present at the show, it might be enjoyable to listen to an extra few minutes of instrumental exercises. But as a studio band, Nektar are very capable of putting together cohesive, multi-part songs that don't feel unnecessarily extended and even short but concise numbers when it suits the continuity of the album. I personally would have appreciated more a single disc of well-recorded and mixed studio tracks, selecting the best of the lot represented here. But that's just me.

With regards to proto-metal, I have heard more convincing albums and artists in that genre. I don't think Nektar were ever trying to be anything other that what they wanted to be. Yes, there are some very sweet pounds and stomps with blazing guitar that fit the proto-metal mould rather nicely. However, the rock n' roll band is still there behind it all. A decent enough album after a few listens but as a proto-metal album it's not quite worth the praise. I'll give it two and a half stars though fans of this period of heavy rock might want to give it more.