Well, one man's trash is another man treasure ))). I really dig "black and white" vinyl release of Solar Music Live, very dynamic. And prefer "Ballerman" black and white remaster over original first press. Go figure.
Glad you found some nice sounding originals. I have the non-remastered Ocean and love it -a demonstration quality cd.
Yeah Booreman's vocals are a big struggle for me too. I prefer their excellent instrumental passages. I have had some Eroc remasters that were good and not crazy compressed, but others have hurt my ears when listening on headphones at reasonable volumes. His remaster of Jade Warrior's Last Autmn Dream sounds excellent.
I find the heavy German accent enhances the music; it adds an air of mystery to it, esp. on Ocean. As for the loud, compressed Eloy remasters, the sad thing is the band was ostensibly unhappy with the sound of the originals, then ended up with something much worse after all those years. Missed opportunity there! Glad I hung on to the originals.
Great band have most of their albums. My two favorite German bands are Eloy & Grobschnitt. Also a must have is Xhol Caravan.
Eloy is definitely one of my favorite German bands. I find them pretty consistent through the early 80s-with Inside and Floating being my personal favorites. For some reason, I can't get into their recent material at all. And I've tried.
Let the schooling begin. I'm always up for getting into some new to me older music. This is particularly true if analog synthesizers are involved. I have heard of Eloy. I wandered close as a tripped through Krautrock but then forgot about them. So thank you for posting. This is one of the reasons I love this forum.
I agree and I still can't get into it. There's a little too much narration for my taste and none of the songs really stand out the way the classic Eloy era does. I didn't like the previous one either. I thought Ocean II was OK.
In Germany, Frank Bornemann's accent, esp. the often incorrect "th", was heavily critized. Many people telling me so, did not do better actually... When listening to Manfred Wieczorke's vocal on Up And Down (Inside, 1973; which i like a lot, very atmospheric), Juergen Rosenthal's spoken intro on Atlantis' Agony (Ocean, 1977), Detlev Schmidtchen's vocals on the Ego album … there was no better vocal choice than Frank Bornemann (Erich Schriever on Same was a really great rock singer though, unfortunately he left Eloy and did not perform live any more afaik). For the 2000+ remasters, i listen to them really loud and yes, they are much louder than the first cd release. Inside always had a very clear, transparent sound, but Floating improved a lot imho (the "curtain" in front of the speakers vanished), Power sounds fine (what an improvement to the Vinyl version - ok, my turntable was a quite simple one back then; today i don't even have one). Ocean, my favourite Eloy album, listening at concert level volume, sounds great. The parts sounding too extreme (e.g. the final part of Poseidon's Creation) are not that different on the first cd release, if volume is raised. So, i normally choose the remasters … Eroc remasters: I was extremely expectant about sound quality. Reading Eroc's homepage raised expectations a lot. For digitizing he offers both tube and Transistor amps, pre-compression of analogue material as necessary, special algorithms in the digital world, Always keeping a small distance to distortion level etc. pp. I do not know his Grobschnitt remasters, but i have the Novalis Schmetterlinge box set and there was something unpleasant soundwise. Now, in my ears, i have to say, Eroc "destroyed" Eloy's music with his Treatment (cd sound, cannot play Vinyl any more). Ok, the tracks are not as loud as the 2000+ EMI remasters, but they still pretend to be very loud, the sound seems extremely "dense", rather dull, not three-dimensional. There are some catchy moments in his work, but all in all, the chance for the definitive remaster versions of these classic Eloy albums has been radically wasted. Really preferring the EMI remaster of Ocean by far! (The only Eroc track i really like, is Astral Entrance from Silent Cries) BTW you can listen to the Eroc remasters on Spotify.
I now collected pretty much all Eloy records I wanted on vinyl, and they sound really great, and not that pricey (S/T is of course an exception) for NM first pressings. Colors, Planets and Turn sound amazing, but others are not bad as well... Eroc did good job with Grobschnitt vinyl B&W releases, and it went downhill from there... Sometimes the best remaster is no remaster at all.
Eloy score! I found a bunch of non-remastered Eloy CDs ... in the Diskunion Heavy Metal shop of all places. I picked up Live, Metromania and Power and the Passion. Previously I'd only heard tracks from PATP on a best of comp, so that was nice, but the real winner was the Live album. Apart from a bit of background hum it is a quality live recording for the era and their performances are great, equaling if not surpassing the studio recordings.
I have three Eloy albums on vinyl. Planets, Time to Turn and Metromania, a kind of trilogy with amazing Roger Dean artwork on the covers, and great music.
I have an orig Dawn on Lp, which I bought based on the cover art years ago. I've only ever listened to it a couple times - I like "Between The Times" and that is mainly for the super cool "Return Of The Voice" segment at the end. The album on a whole reminds me of battling a cold with Nyquil, there is something interesting about the sound but I don't see it getting high marks or even mentioned much in this thread and maybe I will try one of their other albums being recommended here.
I love Eloy. One of my fave prog-rock bands. I'm not very much into their recent works, but I listen very often to "Dawn" album and everything at that period.
One "really old" German band which recent output was pretty good is Epitaph. Their last two records "Fire from the Soul" and "Long Ago Tomorrow" are awesome, as well as semi-acoustic live set "A night at the old station". Matches the best stuff from seventies (of course recorded a little bit compressed, but that is what we are dealing with almost all new released records). My apologies for off-topic.
Planets, Time To Turn, Performance and Metromania have been released in UK, too, on Heavy Metal Records by Paul Birch. Performance had the original EMI abum cover, the other three received different ones by Rodney Matthews: Planets => Artwork: The Golden Age Time To Turn => Artwork: Time To Turn (specifically designed for Eloy. I still pretend to see the face of Frank Bornemann, standing on the chariot... ) Metromania => Artwork: Be Watchful (F.B. once said, he wanted to use it for solo album) The Golden Age and Time To Turn are still available as huge posters. All four albums were also released as picture Discs (Vinyl, RM artwork). Frank was invited to do a promotional tour in the UK for the Planets release. In 1984 they played three concerts in London, selling out the Marquee twice. A third evening in the Marquee had to be declined by the band due to other obligations (of whatever kind...). A few months later this Eloy lineup broke apart. It was the technically most skilled lineup and Eloy did never return as a truly "vivid" band...
