SCORPIONS — Lonesome Crow (review)

SCORPIONS — Lonesome Crow album cover Album · 1972 · Proto-Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
1.5/5 ·
Losimba
Another debut that is way below the standard of later albums of the artist. The problems here are multi-layered.

The sound itself is quite different to everything else we know of Scorpions, which is due to the fact that Rudolf Schenker's brother Michael is involved. That's not bad per se, but the real good phase started when Matthias Jabs took over the guitar a few years later. I don't want to say Michael is a bad guitarist, if he were he wouldn't have played with UFO, but I'm not too excited about his style. A real problem, however, is Klaus Meine's singing, it seems he hadn't developped his distinct voice by then. Also, his English pronounciation didn't seem too fine then as there are passages all across the album where it is nearly impossible to understand a single word. Finally, the songwriting is very weak. There's one pretty good song, In Search Of The Peace Of Mind, in which we first see the ballad structure later perfected in Holiday, but the rest is far below average, especially for this band. The absolute lowlight is the title track, thirteen and a half minutes of a failed attempt to cross over Krautrock with Pink Floyd's Echoes. A wise musician once said that it doesn't matter if a good song is two or twenty minutes long, but a bad song shouldn't be longer than one and a half. This is my prime example to prove the second half of this sentence.

I'm happy that Lonesome Crow wasn't even close to be the first Scorpions albums I heard. Had it been I probably wouldn't have listened to anything else by them and missed out on some of my favourite songs recorded on later albums.
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siLLy puPPy wrote:
more than 2 years ago
This is a grower. I started with 80s Scoprions and was initially disappointed with this but as i became more of a fan of prog rock especially Krautrock it really started to make sense. Don't write it off! I am going to write a review on this one soon. 4 stars for me :) Good review though
Unitron wrote:
more than 2 years ago
Good review, I actually like this album, not as much as 'Fly to the Rainbow' or 'Taken by Force' but I still like it. I understand though how fans of the Scorpions that most people know wouldn't though, It's definitely a far cry from anything else they've done.

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