Artist: 7for4
Label: MGI Records (KDC)
Released: 2004
Runtime: 58:22
Rating: 4.5/5
The second album from these German jazz metallers is once again going to give us headaches with our hypothetical perfect system for sorting music. The Munich troubadours have found even more courage this time and gone for a slightly more experimental genre blend, even though the skeleton and foundation are still jazz fusion and progressive metal. This time the “mix” also gets splashes of folk and a touch of the Canterbury scene (Gong, Caravan, Camel, Soft Machine …), and you can hear a role model the guys seem to borrow from, at least in part: Dream Theater. After this album, the label “Dream Theater goes jazz (with german Vai behind the guitar)” has popped up quite a few times, a tag that first started appearing after their debut, Contact. 7for4 reportedly got introduced along similar lines when they played in Würzburg in front of the far better-known Karmakanic.
So the jazz reincarnation of Dream Theater decided, 3 years after that phenomenal debut, to get back to jamming and recording in the studio. Expectations were huge, Zenk (who once again wrote all the compositions himself) promised a lot ahead of the release, and the wait tortured every German fusion jazzer and prog metalhead. What they got was what they expected – a bomb of creative, unique music that logically carries on from where the debut Contact left off.
The magic number nine (tracks) has been swapped for eleven this time, and you can tell on the clock – these good-natured Germans chain us to the speakers for an extra 7 minutes. The first track, “7eitgeist” (“The Spirit of the Age”), opens the album brilliantly. Even the name is all about “time,” and while listening to it, that’s exactly what we forget – time. Engl kicks off super strong with a powerful rhythm, and Froschmeier colors the rest of the track jazzy with a keyboard pattern. Zenk and the other Markus quickly join in and finally polish off the melody. The song is kind of stitched together from lots of consecutive parts that link it up, and maybe that’s exactly why we get that sense of timelessness. Zenk’s Latin touches just add spice to an already excellent “start” to the record.
“Temperamento,” which follows “7eitgeist,” starts off incredibly temperamental, just as the name tells us; with the fast rhythms of drums, guitar and keyboards (the bass sits more in the background), we want to get up and dance – it’s samba time! A proper dance number from the German progressives, a jazz-rock-flavored samba with occasional rock riffs thrown in and unusual timing breaks. Once again 7for4 outdo themselves. Virtuoso Zenk reigns with fast “shredding” and “sweeping” across the scales, Engl shows off with some more exotic drumming, and Froschmeier with a Spanish-flavored keyboard sound (Grützner really does next to nothing here from the listener’s seat). The last quarter of the song does morph into a more typical melody from the Germans, and it ends abruptly, practically out of nowhere.
A “spacy” acoustic guitar sound takes us into “Where Are You Now,” the only track on the album, and only the second in this band’s career, to feature vocals – this time, unlike the one on Contact, they’re female; the voice belongs to Conny Kreitmeier, who sings with various other bands (she also sings chansons), e.g. the funk-rock group Daisy Ultra. Everything sounds pretty fusion-y, right down to the vocals; the first part of the singing is very close to pop; it doesn’t last long before the rhythm and the voice quickly pick up, until the song returns to that poppy melodicism. A very mellow track (for 7for4), where Zenk once again leads the way and Froschmeier plays a big part too. The song ends completely calm, with Conny’s vocals.
“7:44 AM” (read the title carefully – “seven for four”) dips back into somewhat jazzier waters, and you can feel what’s left of “7eitgeist.” Great melody, and again Zenk launches into crazy solos, cuts them off at impossible moments and carries on with an ambient, refined melody. The track is kind of the definition of the band itself, heavily jazzy with occasional progressive metal parts that come to the front mostly thanks to Wolfgang’s guitar. Toward the end the track slides into a more rock’n’roll rhythm, with a melody from old westerns. The German jazz metallers also finish as befits them, with that jazzy ease and calm, and 7for4 throw one more witty “bonus” at us in this track – it’s exactly 7 minutes and 44 seconds long.
The first part of the title track is outstanding, Froschmeier’s keyboards carry us off to another world. Zenk’s string work has a strong role model in Gilmour, and the track starts out much like those Pink Floyd numbers where Wright and Gilmour are out front. The song morphs into some kind of classical piano playing and melodic “guitaring,” with just the right dose of that fusion. The musicians leave us no choice but to close our eyes and let the flow of the music carry us away. The end ends with the beginning (if we can even say that; does time start somewhere, does time maybe end?) – with an incredible keyboard sound in the background and pleasant guitar bits.
The title alone, “Rock’n’Rolex,” tells us enough. Strong rock rhythms and soloing from metalhead Zenk. A fairly repetitive track that gets lost among a pile of better songs. If I’d heard it before ever listening to 7for4, I’d have had nothing but praise for it, but as it is, it’s just one more superior track that doesn’t surprise. Classic for this German band. Perhaps worth mentioning are only Zenk’s solos, which are, if that’s even possible, even crazier than in the songs we’ve already heard.
“Perpetuum Mobile” is another great example of not knowing what to file a track under. Of course, it’s obvious that sticking labels on music is ridiculous and ultimately pointless. The track contains incredible breaks between individual sections, which are a kind of dividing line between fast-played jazz and progressive metal, a sort of action-movie atmosphere where Engl and Froschmeier come to the fore a bit. A track that is once again kind of “perfect”; we expected nothing less from the “7for4 guys.”
The eighth track continues the title piece, and once again we find ourselves in that “Pink Floyd-ish” world; the rhythm, quite uncharacteristic for them, and the whole environment they create are downright fantastic. Zenk shows he doesn’t just have fast and precise fingers, but can also be a refined gentleman; up to the halfway point, anyway, because the guys just can’t get out of their own skin, and an explosion of sound snatches us out of the world built up before and throws us into the familiar, typical “7for4-style” melody of jazz and metal elements. Still, Froschmeier himself finishes it off nicely with some calm keyboard tinkling.
Just when we’ve kind of forgotten about Grützner’s bass, Markus himself reminds us of it. “Flux Capacitor” (all you sci-fi movie fans will instantly think of “Back to the Future”) is a loud jazz fusion track, with interesting time shifts and the signature sound of Zenk’s guitar that we’re already used to. The jazzy parts spice up the sonic picture a lot, and because of them it also departs from the “7for4-style” overchewed classicism.
When we hope for something different from the next track, that’s exactly what we get – we hear the country twang of Zenk’s guitar. “Burnt Chicken Wings” (quite a fitting title given the musical content) is a real “ear-candy,” with super bouncy country parts, and otherwise rock’n’roll riffs and just as much rock’n’roll rhythm. Even if country music was never listenable for you, Zenk plays it so virtuosically that you’ll happily picture American trailer-park rednecks surrounded by chickens. Of course country isn’t all the track has to offer, the incredible metal solos and Froschmeier’s occasional interesting keyboard bits, on top of Zenk’s sheer genius in the country parts, get rid of the perhaps expected monotony. The acoustic guitar playing wraps up an excellent example of genre blending in music.
The last track, “Slow [e]motion,” is, as we can tell from the title, slower in tempo, with Zenk not pushing too hard, and there’s a kind of balance between the instruments; even if we didn’t know it was the final track, you can feel it. Definitely a splendid closer.
The album gives us a glimpse of another side of Zenk the songwriter – mostly in the two-part track “Time,” which shows that all he can do isn’t just insanely fast string-shredding. The concept is ideal for doing something similar on a larger scale (maybe a whole album?), because the jazz-metal sound in question (though characteristic) that 7for4, and Zenk above all, are so faithful to is starting to get pretty repetitive; once you get used to it, it somehow turns monotonous. Luckily this album only gives a taste of what’s been written. Still, the guys have progressed somewhat, Zenk especially; let’s say he “learned” a bit from the previous album and left his darkest side outside the studio, since Time is a record leaning more jazz than metal. Of course it’s still an album that is extremely guitar-driven, with little room for the other instruments, though there’s never so little of them that you could hold it against it in any serious way.
So 7for4 stay true to their signature sound, which they found already on the debut Contact. They can still surprise the listener in a good way, and they manage it either by adding some genre (country, classical) or by creating a completely different world (which they pull off with the track “Time” and partly with “7eitgeist” and “7:44 AM”). Listeners’ expectations ahead of the release are definitely met, but they also stir up new expectations (and doubts) about the future and the next releases.
Lineup
Wolfgang Zenk – guitar
Markus Grützner – bass guitar
Klaus Engl – drums
Markus Froschmeier – keyboards
Production
Wolfgang Zenk
Tracklist
1. 7eitgeist
2. TempERAmento
3. Where Are You Now
4. 7:44 AM
5. Time (Chapter I)
6. Rock’n’Rolex
7. Perpetuum Mobile
8. Time (Chapter II)
9. Flux Capacitor
10. Burnt Chicken Wings
11. Slow [e]motion
