AFT's career was short, but they managed to leave a document of fine high-octane guitar rock for us to enjoy. The sound of the band is all over the place, borrowing twin guitar leads of Wishbone Ash, but taking them to the next level, throwing in some twists ala King Crimson, and some heavy rock pounding along the lines of T2. Lots of classical orientations which become the signature of the band. Even more impressive, they ended up doing two 15 Min long instrumentals without falling into the cliche soloing or excessive jams. It's as if one of the guitars has been substituted for the keyboards in this particular recording. The sharp and furious leads are coupled with lovely classical styled soloing.
Extremely talented musicians and composers at the very end, the bass work is great, and the drumming even greater. The long tracks are of course the peak of the album lots of nice leads and rhythms, melodic and almost dramatic sounding solos and plenty of well placed breaks. "Queen of the Night" is the onlt track to feature some vocals and moves into the more typical rock vein. Credit should be given to Americans Lloyd and Neil Grossman (producers) for the excellent work on the album as well.
One of the best 70's outputs in the simplistic formation of guitar, bass, and drums.
Released on Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen's DiscReet label in 1974, this album remains largely unknown. The album is a mix of Rock and Roll/hard rock/blues rock. There are shades of Johnny Winter on some tracks as well as CCR. The singer even sounds like Nazareth's Dan McCafferty in places. Reminicent of Foghat's earlier work. All in all a very good, if not very short album that deserved so much more attention. But like most bands of the early 70's, Growl faded into obscurity.
If you like no -bullshit/straight forward Rockandroll, then this album is for you.
Diek Steffens stidied guitar & piano at the hamburg Conservatory. He played in Bethovens from 1969 - 1971. In '71, he began his own group Pennywonder, which also consisted of Thomas Kuckuck, Jurgen Elhert, and Enricho Lombardi. In july of 1973 he joined the band Birth Control, and by 1974 had left the band for family reasons. He then worked as a guitar instructio and studio musician. In the fall of 1975, he began work on his first studio album "The Seventh Step" on which he played guitar and with some help from Ian Cussick from Scottland (a member of Lucifers Friend) as well as musician Rolf Kholer from Hamburg and a member of To Be. "The Seventh step" was finished and released in 1976 on Nova records, and a second albumwas released by Nova "Tollhouse" in 1978.
From "Prog Archives": Playing locally in and around clubs in Germany, Switzerland, and France since 1968, Dies Irae consisting of Roger Wahlman (vocals/harmonica), Harold Thoma (guitar/vocals), Joachim Shiff (bass), and Andreas Cornillius (drums) were finaaly discovered by the long defunct Hamburg record laber PILZ in 1971. They were a progressive psychedelic/freakout blues band with a darker side from Saarbucken, Germany who only released one LP and one single (as well as being featured on a PILZ compilation "Heavy Christmas"), in 1971 before splitting up in 1972 citing "artistic differences". Two offshoot bands then appeared: Lucy Gang and Green wave.
Not to be confused weith a number of Metal bands called Dies Irae, which litterally translates to "Day of Wrath", which is the title of a latin hymn that refers to the day of judgement before the throne of God where the saved are delivered from evil and the unsaved are cast into eternal flames. The Dies Irae has been compared to Black Sabbath on their first album for PILZ because of their guitar/harmonica sound with lyrical references to the occult Although the lyrics wee far more trippy and out there.
