Colour Haze

I subscribe to Classic Rock magazine, and sometimes buy the PROG version of the same.  Each issue comes with a free CD sampler of music.  Unfortunately, most of the music turns out to be “Best new bands” that invariably sound almost exactly like established bands.  In other words, the new bands haven’t yet outgrown their influences.  So listening to the sampler becomes a tedious affair of “which band are they ripping off”?  The Classic Rock team loves giving us incessant clones of Guns N’Roses and the Rolling Stones, while PROG gives us more Yes copycats.  With regard to prog it’s even more egregious:  how are you “prog” if you’re simply copying Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, etc. without adding anything new of your own?  They’re practically de facto tribute bands.  Anyhow.

In this case, the band Colour Haze from Munich, Germany, I had the opposite problem.  They have enough of a unique sound that trying to figure out who they sound like was a real challenge. 

The label “stoner rock” definitely applies, and some may consider them Germany’s premier stoner rock band.  They have 11 studio albums from 1995 (Chopping Machine) to 2014 (To The Highest Gods We Know), and a live album from 2009 (Burg Herzberg Festival).  The current lineup is Stefan Koglek (guitar, vocals), Philipp Rasthofer (bass), and Manfred Merwald (drums). 

I do hear Orange Goblin, Grateful Dead, and Blue Cheer – but by that I mean Blue Cheer (self-titled fourth album) and The Original Human Being.  Often there’s a fairly clean guitar tone, but unlike Jerry Garcia, Koglek knows what distortion is, and although they jam heavily, there are plenty of modest-length songs, so I’ve yet to get bored by them.  Much of their music has an airy, drone-like quality, though not as slow, sludgy or doomy as Sleep or Electric Wizard.  They seem to like single-word song titles.  On ALL, which at this point is my favorite (although I still don’t have all their albums), the song titles almost seem to form a sentence.  It’s reached the point where I prefer them to Kyuss, a band the stoner rock crowd seems to consider the best. 

For now they only seem to tour Europe – the same deal as Hawkwind and the other German psychedelic bands.  If they come to the US I’ll happily go.  In the meantime, I have five albums left to acquire and digest before they find their way here.