DSCHINN — Dschinn (review)

Album · 1972 · Heavy Psych

3.5/5 · 2021-03-31
siLLy puPPy

Another one of the many short-lived bands that jumped into Germany’s Krautrock scene in the early 1970s was the Marburg based DSCHINN which originated in a response to the Beatles-mania that took over the world in the 1960s. Starting out as The Hurricanes, the smitten group of Bernd "Capo" Capito (lead guitar, vocals), Peter "Eddy" Lorenz (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Silvio Verfürth (bass, vocals), Athanasios "Jacky" Paltoglou (drums, percussion) and Uli Mund (drums, percussion) were successful in scoring live gigs all throughout Germany including the famous beat clubs such as the StarDust in Hamburg.

All of this touring caught the attention of a successful businessman who became one of the band’s biggest fans and proceeded to fund a few singles but under the condition that the band changed its name to Dischas under which three singles were released including the first one "Here What I Say/Come Back To Me" which actually made it into the top 10 on the Austrian singles charts. Unfortunately the band was unable to continue the momentum and changed its game plan altogether as the pop rock beat and mod styles of the 60s were quickly falling out of fashion.

The band not only changed its sound to a more progressive style of heavy psych but adopted the more mysterious moniker DSCHINN or in English, jinn or jinni which in the Koran and Muslim traditions is a spirit often capable of assuming human or animal form and exercising supernatural influence over human beings. Likewise the band developed a more sophisticated sound and although lumped into the early world of Krautrock was in fact a hard rock band with heavy psych influences from the late 1960s. The band released this one self-titled album in 1972 with a trippy Dali-esque album cover which featured nine vocal oriented tracks that featured heavy bluesy guitar riffs, beefy bass lines, intricate percussion sounds and even a harmonica part or two.

Unlike much of Germany’s Krautrock artists who were entering the twilight zone with freaky tripped out sounds designed for a trip to the cosmos and beyond, DSCHINN was much more down to earth and in reality sounded much more like an Anglo / American hard rock band of the same era with lyrics about freedom, love and other everyday affairs. The music wasn’t particularly complex and instead revolved around catchy blues based melodies. While the music itself was fairly average by the era’s standards, DSCHINN did stand out in the fact that it had two percussionists and delivered strong polypercussive grooves that adopted some of the ethnic influences of the Middle East somewhat in the vein of Agitation Free only in the context of bluesy hard rock.

Another immediate standout was the vocal style of Peter Lorenz which sort of sounded like a more exotic version of The Guess Who’s Burton Cummings only with a slight accent. The band itself seems to have picked up a few tips from bands like The Guess Who or Grandfunk Railroad and was clearly looking to the English speaking world for inspiration. This all but forgotten obscurity from Germany’s diverse Krautrock scene may not go down in history as the most essential of artifacts from the early 1970s but it is an interesting slice of heavy psych laced with period pop rock along with a few Krautish elements that remind me of Amon Düül II at times but these are just accents and only complement the staunch blues rock worship. Not a bad album at all but not extremely creative either.