**Gatefold black vinyl, remastered** One year on from Opal, the Munich collective threw open a window that would never quite close again. Embryo had announced themselves in 1970 with a debut steeped in dark, psychedelic murk. Embryo's Rache - their second, issued on United Artists in 1971 - is the sound of a band stepping into the light and looking east. Founded by drummer and keyboard player Christian Burchard with multi-instrumentalist Edgar Hofmann, the group here absorbed flutist Hansi Fischer (lately of Xhol Caravan) and the American session phantom Jimmy Jackson, credited under the alias "Tabarin Man," whose Mellotron threads through the record like coloured smoke. Recorded at Dierks Studios, it caught Embryo at the precise moment their jazz-rock began to bleed into something stranger and more far-flung.
The opener, Tausendfüßler, sets the terms: Fischer's flute coils over fuzzed organ and Burchard's Leslie-fed electric piano, the rhythm section restless beneath, while a scatter of hand percussion hints at a geography well beyond Bavaria. From there the album never settles. Hofmann's soprano saxophone carries the long shadow of late Coltrane; the clavinet and organ jams run funky and feral; Jackson's Mellotron rises in great banked strings and brass. It is, by turns, a post-Coltrane reverie, an Amon Düül II fever, a Fela-adjacent groove machine - players from different worlds shut in one incense-thick room and told to keep going.
The politics are not buried. Espagna Si, Franco No stretches past ten minutes on a current of anti-fascist conviction, the band refusing the Spain of the dictatorship while the music churns and lifts around the slogan. Elsewhere the English-language vocals betray the limits of the moment - this was a band that spoke most fluently through its instruments - but the playing answers every reservation. Few krautrock records of the period swing this hard while reaching this far.
Jackson is the album's secret thread, the kind of connection that rewards a closer look: an American keyboardist who drifted out of the Ray Charles orbit and into the German underground, leaving his Mellotron on records by Amon Düül II and Passport as well as this one. He is the ghost in Embryo's machine, the link between Black American music and a Munich vanguard about to point itself toward Asia and North Africa.
That outward turn is what Embryo's Rache set in motion. The full world-fusion that became Embryo's signature still lay ahead, but the compass was set here. A foundational document of German jazz-rock, a band finding the future by facing an ancient one - and one of the finest things Burchard's restless company ever committed to tape. Long sought after on the original United Artists pressing, it returns now on vinyl, with a limited clear-vinyl edition of 200 copies. Move quickly.
