RAMSES - LIGHT FANTASTIC - 1981

German progressive rock from 1981. Not nearly as much prog as their first two albums. This is more a sort of catchy, melodic space-progressive krautpop. I think it is a perfectly good album and since it hasn’t been ripped & released before I might as well do it.
German semi-commercial prog rock band who made a few albums in the late seventies, and were then topped by the excellent Anyone's Daughter with whom they share some similarities. Close in style to the late seventies German bands a la Eloy, Grobschnitt, etc.
La Leyla has some of the same simultaneously gruff and spacey aura as fellow Hanoverian bands Eloy and Jane. However, Ramses' guitar-keyboard team, the Langhorst brothers Norbert and Winfried, distinguish the band from their bigger brothers with the kind of vivid and melodic interplay between the bluesy lead guitar and synthesizer which Anyone's Daughter would perfect a couple of years later. String-synthesizer assisted stretches of spacey lyricism ("Garden" alternate with angry organ riffs and Teutonic stomp ("War", held together with overall strong, though not exceptional songwriting that gives this a bit of tentative soft-rock egde over the hard-rock air typical of those earlier groups. The tender melancholy of Novalis comes to mind at places, though Ramses are never as resplendent with their spacey moodiness. There is also a whiff of sweaty velvet in the combination of lead vocalist Herbert Natho's rather deadpan rock delivery and Winfried Langhorst's campy falsetto contributions, as well as in the streak of downright lechery intruding upon Natho's now hopelessly naпve-sounding sermonising (especially "Someone Like You". A very direct and engaging album of unexceptional style.

Eternity Rise is a more polished album in sound and arrangements, even incorporating a string-section as a colouring agent. "City Life" and "Windy" employ more acoustic textures, are closer to conventional pop-rock and work quite well as a result. Elsewhere, however, the brawny immediacy of La Leyla tends to be mired by spaciness of the wrong kind, i.e. compositional hollowness which the sonorous Genesisoid cadences and sonic lustre cannot completely camouflage. "Agitation Play" picks up the reins with some surprisingly vigorous, organ-led instrumental spacerock, and the 11-minute title track redeems the album with its passionate symphonic progressive rock. Its closing section, the grand Hackett-like guitar line soaring and spiralling over a Banksian organ march, is probably the group's single greatest musical moment. Those unwilling to choose between the rough and concise La Leyla and the more sophisticated but fickle Eternity Rise don't have to do so, for both are available on a single CD
By Light Fantastic the pop-rock streak of Eternity Rise had become the dominant strand in Ramses' music. Most of the songs are built on standard rock-guitar riffs, simple drum rhythms, light-weight pop melodies and catchy choruses. The Langhorsts and the second keyboard player Matthias Mцller get to lay down a few interesting instrumental lines and solos, especially on the longer tracks "Force of Habit" and "Earth in the Dark", but this is unlikely to appease many progressive-rock fans. The one instrumental, "Across the Everglades", is a stereotypical German synthesizer instrumental: a pulsing synth bassline, monotonous 4/4 rhythm and spacey synth effects frame a droning, minor-key harmonic progression and an unremarkable solo synthesizer line. This has been done better by countless others. Same could be said of the album itself. The CD (Sky CD 3050) has a bonus track, "Noise" - which is in fact a US version of "War" with new lyrics (apparently the Vietnam reference in the original was deemed unsuitable for sensitive American ears).

A mere nineteen years after Light Fantastic, Ramses released Control Me as a comeback album. Sadly, the only real development has been in the production department. The kind of homogenised, early-1990s AOR sound permeates this, and the music its power guitars and sprightly synth pads convey is unfortunately no more distinctive. Even the relative innocence and charm of Control Me has been lost in the flood of new technology, even though the musicians are still quite proficient. Still, Ramses' one-time rivals and victors Anyone's Daughter didn't fare much better on their own comeback album Danger World. - Kai Karmanheimo, New Gibraltar
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