Seven is probably the rarest Colour Haze album. To wit, as of this writing, there are three CD copies of the band’s prior 1995 debut, Chopping Machine (discussed here), currently listed for sale on eBay between $70-90 each, but none of 1998’s Seven. None on Discogs either, or any of the other secondary-market places one might go to find it. For a long time, I called it the Great White Whale of my CD collection, and when I finally got it, it was only thanks to the generosity of the band. That was 11 years ago and I remain appreciative.

Like its predecessor, Seven has never been reissued. More than that, it was barely issued in the first place. The only copies that were made were burned onto CDRs by the band themselves — in 1998, that would’ve taken a while as well, it was not a quick process; the record label is listed as Self Burn Records as a joke — with printed covers. I don’t know how many there were, but as I recall it wasn’t more than 100. It’s available readily to hear online, of course (you might say it’s streaming above this text right now), but otherwise it is the lost Colour Haze album even more than Chopping Machine.

This is odd in some ways because, also like Chopping Machine, Seven doesn’t really represent the band Colour Haze were on the way to being. But it’s certainly closer to it. There is a burgeoning warmth in the tone of guitarist Stefan Koglek, and it’s the first appearance of the rhythm section of Philipp Rasthofer and Manfred Merwald, who in the years to come would provide the backbone and movement behind Koglek‘s aesthetic-defining heavy psychedelic and progressive expolorations, but it’s also a standout in their catalog for being the only album on which Koglek doesn’t sing lead, instead providing backup vocals to standalone frontman Felix Neuenhoff, who was in the band for this record and gone by the time its follow-up was released the next year.

So in some ways, what you have is Colour Haze‘s sound beginning to take shape. The basic feel of the songs still holds some of the brooding tendencies of Chopping Machine, but it’s pretty clear that the band would’ve heard Kyuss in the three interim years there — also, three years is the longest break the band would have between outings for the next decade, so clearly there was restructuring happening on multiple levels — as there is a tinge of desert rock in early rockers like “Self” and “Pulse” never mind the later slow-into-the-roll of “Second Man” or the way the title-track builds itself up across its eight minutes. But Colour Haze were a classically inspired band as well, which they nod to in the opening “White Room,” though their take on the Cream classic is about 15 seconds of feedback and a couple notes credited to Jack Bruce before “Self” kicks in. Nice to see a bit of humor there, maybe.

Seven, though it was never released on vinyl, is also the first real Colour Haze 2LP, running 14 tracks and a sprawling CD-era-room-for-all-on-one-disc 71 minutes. But the structure hints at vinyl, with the title-track capping the first platter and the subsequent “House of Rushammon” starting the second. Longtime fans might recognize “House of Rushammon” as it’s one of just a couple songs here that would be reworked onto subsequent outings — “Pulse” can be heard on 1999’s Periscope, and “House of Rushammon” and “Self” show up on 2001’s Ewige Blumenkraft (reissue review here) — and one that still might make its way into a live set. And in terms of flow, the band were beginning to figure out how to structure an album to highlight dynamic, putting a faster song like “Mine” after an airier nodder like “Planet” and letting the residual feedback after the dual-vocal crescendo of “Second Man” go before the subsequent “Ride (Morrison)” picks up from the silence and begins its own gradual build as the sort-of finale, coming as it does ahead of “Rewind,” which indeed is 41 seconds of rewinding a tape, and an instrumental take on “Pulse” that isn’t listed as a bonus track but is kind of an epilogue for the album anyhow.

But the point is that, sound-wise, they were getting there, and in both the songs that would later be reworked and in the material that surrounds, one can hear the roots of Colour Haze‘s longterm creative chase beginning to establish themselves. I recognize that this wouldn’t have been something known in 1998, but Neuenhoff as a singer is not so far removed from Koglek‘s vocal style as to sound out of line entirely with Colour Haze from here on out, and the parts where the two come together are genuinely satisfying. Seven is a rocker. It’s not perfect, and the band may think of it as more of a demo testing out this short-lived incarnation of the band from which a core trio would emerge and spend the next 22 years refining their approach, but it’s not like Colour Haze had nothing to offer listeners at this point.

Of note is that Koglek and Neuenhoff shared lyric-writing duties, and cuts like “Under Water” and “House of Rushamon,” were worked on by both. These songs, along with “Superstar,” by Neuenhoff alone (he’s also solely credited with “Mine,” “Seven,” “Second Man” and “Garden”) have an explicitly christian, faith-based point of view, which certainly makes Seven a further outlier in the Colour Haze catalog. Whether that’s part of what’s held back a reissue, I don’t know, but it’s another among the album’s standout aspects and demonstrates that the exploratory penchant that was taking hold for them instrumentally was happening on multiple levels.

For those who, like me, would become familiar with the band through their later work, Seven is both a curio and a showcase of their nascent character. Its value is partially academic for that, admittedly, and the fact that it’s never been reissued/re-pressed makes it feel like something of a forbidden artifact. But it can tell you things about the band that no other release in their discography can, and especially for fans, it marks out a step on the broader path that needed to be taken.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

School starts Monday, we found out yesterday. Last week, The Patient Mrs. hired an attorney. We went into mediation with the district — fuck the district forever, by the way; let me say that before I maybe have to sign an NDA and not talk about this anymore — on Monday and yesterday we went to the place where we wanted to send her for an open house and the head of the school was like, “yeah, she can start Monday, full day.” So, school starts Monday.

Knowing that is a relief, and a weight off all of our shoulders, perhaps most of all The Pecan’s, who has spent much of the summer asking where she’s going to go to school in the Fall. We have more dealings with the district — and here I’ll pause to credit The Patient Mrs. for running point on this process; she is both boots-on-the-ground and the overseeing admiral in terms of parenting; I am a grunt on my best days — to do, papers to sign, but again, knowing the where and when, and having gotten the placement we wanted feels pretty big.

The town fucked us out of her having a para — she’s never been to school without one — but settling on something is better than nothing, which is exactly the dogshit situation the district wanted us in in the first place. Next year, when we have to rejustify the placement, I think maybe we’ll just start with the lawyer, knowing what we know now about the Parsippany Troy-Hills School District’s inability to negotiate in good faith in the best interests of its special education students, whom it would rather sweep away into an ERI classroom and not think about.

Months of my life on this crap. Months.

And it’s not over, because invariably there will be complexities in her experience at the new school, hard days, trouble transitioning from one thing to another, the persistent work avoidance issues and refusals, redirects, etc. The difference is she’s in a space — we. hope. — better equipped to recognize these things as the neurological challenges than they are rather than “bad behaviors” like it’s the 1980s and kids just need a good spanking or whatever the fuck the district’s position was; they were never actually able to produce data for refusing the placement, and yes, we asked multiple times.

Bitter relief, perhaps.

Her starting this new school is the beginning of a new day-structure for me as well. Her old school, while unable to effectively educate her, was three minutes from the house. This is at least a half-hour each way, which means if I drop her and come back home, then make another trip to pick her up, that’s an hour’s drive twice a day, which is more of a commute than I’ve done in years. I don’t know that I’ll be able to find somewhere to be over that way, there for the day, and if I was, I’d be concerned about the dog being alone for that long, so that will be a thing to navigate/figure out, and it will take time.

Meanwhile, this week started The Patient Mrs.’ Fall semester, which makes this coming week her first full one of classes, and that’s always an adjustment as well. What I’m telling you is please give me a couple weeks to settle into the routine. If posts go up at weird times or there are days with only one or two posts like this week (I think Tuesday had two, where usually I want three or four a day), bear with me. I’m not going anywhere — in the sense of ending the site; I am going somewhere in terms of the back and forth of the aforementioned commute — but while I’m getting used to this new routine in my day, I’ll probably need some time, just going by past experience in such changes.

Also meanwhile, next week is lined up to be one of the best I’ve had this year. I’ve got premieres set for The Machine, Buzzard, Spirit Mother, Tooms and Rapidly Aging, not in that order, but all of which are front-to-back awesome. I write about a lot of stuff I think is cool — that’s the point of the thing — but rarely do things line up to highlight so much I dig in so condensed a span of time. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I know I will.

I don’t know what’s on this weekend. We don’t have grand last-weekend-of-summer plans in no small part because until yesterday we didn’t know this was the end of the summer. I assume ice cream will happen, but beyond that, I just have shrugs and we’ll-figure-something-outs.

Whatever you’re up to, I hope you have a great and safe weekend, provided you’re not a fascist, which I’m reasonably sure you’re not because in my headcanon all the dickweeds have shown themselves the door and everyone who remains can count basic human empathy among their superpowers. Rest assured, if that’s not you, please continue to fuck off. The world without you is paradise.

FRM.

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The word seems to have fallen out of use as quickly as it came into it, but I remain something of a completist, and Colour Haze‘s 1998 second full-length, Seven, has haunted the back of my mind for years. Perhaps even more since March 2012, when I shelled out for a copy of the German outfit’s moody 1995 debut, Chopping Machine (discussed here), since that made Seven the last of their full-lengths I didn’t own. The only one. To date, Colour Haze have 11 records, and just the one I didn’t have. If you listened hard enough, you could hear the teeth gnawing at me. Squint, and you could see the hole on my CD rack.

Early in 2014, I put up a review of their 2001 fifth outing, Ewige Blumenkraft, which boasts the track “House of Rushammon.” That song originally appeared on Seven, and I referred to the album in a parenthetical aside as, “the Great White Whale of my CD collection; someday I’ll own a copy and gaze upon it with pride for the remainder of my days.” Extreme, maybe, but not untrue. You might think I’m kidding around when I title these posts “Buried Treasure,” but I’m not. I place real value on owning albums, CD, LP or tape, whatever format it might be, and being the last of Colour Haze‘s work I hadn’t heard — having refused to chase down an illicit download or listen on YouTube — Seven was a genuine prize in my head.

I knew from hearing Chopping Machine and the fact that the band hadn’t reissued it that it probably wouldn’t be a landmark in terms of the actual material itself, but still. Still several years off from guitarist/vocalist Stefan Koglek starting his Elektrohasch Schallplaten imprint, Seven was released on CDR with inkjet-printed labels on the jokingly dubbed Self Burn Records. I don’t even know if they made 100 copies, let alone any more than that. It’s never been re-pressed, was never widely distributed, and in the wake of the brilliant offerings they’ve had since, has been largely forgotten, much, I think, by design.

A package arrived a short while ago from Munich. After that Ewige Blumenkraft review, Koglek teased that he’d have to see if he could find a “great white whale” for me, but honestly, I wasn’t holding onto much hope. Then there it was. Having just been through a move, Koglek not only found a copy of Seven, in its original jewel case with the printed liners and all, but took the time to send it over with a few other choice keepsakes to be detailed at another time, knowing that, indeed, I’d spend the rest of my days gazing on it with pride. The included note read, “Hi JJ, As it happens… it took a while but I stumbled over the ‘white whale’ for you during the preparation for our move. Hope you enjoy all the goodies a lot. :) All the best, Stefan.”

This, my friends, is the stuff of life.

I’m almost hesitant to talk too much about the album itself, since the band obviously doesn’t really want it out there or else it would be; they have their own label and haven’t been shy in the past about putting stuff out again when they feel the time and circumstances warrant. Like Chopping Machine, the audio of seven is a long way from what Colour Haze would become in years subsequent — for one thing, they’re a four-piece, with standalone vocalist Felix Neuenhoff singing and Koglek handling backing vocals and guitar while Philip Rasthofer plays bass and Manfred Merwald (listed in the liner as “Mani,” as I’ve heard others refer to him) plays drums — the trio as they are today otherwise intact.

And while one can hear where Koglek, who was at the time engaged in the work of finding his own voice, may have later taken some influence from Neuenhoff, Seven is a different vibe throughout that I think would surprise a lot of people who follow Colour Haze today, from the post-grunge grit of “Planet” to the Christian lyrical themes in “Under Water,” “Superstar” and “House of Rushammon” — those would remain intact on the re-recorded version, but the context is different — to the early-Tool-style rhythmic push of “Second Man” or “Pulse,” which also appears as an instrumental as the finale of Seven‘s 71-minute run.

Yet, particularly in light of the work they’ve done in the 17 years since, from the exploratory first steps toward their groundbreaking heavy psychedelia in the next year’s Periscope to 2015’s To the Highest Gods We Know (review here), one can hear flashes of what’s to come, in the deft turns Merwald makes sound so fluid, or in the rumble of Rasthofer‘s bass and the standalone moments of Koglek‘s guitar. They’d make that shift quickly, losing Neuenhoff within a year’s time and beginning to form the classic power trio dynamic they continue to refine, but one can hear listening to Seven the shift taking place between what they were on Chopping Machine and what they’d be on Periscope, and I consider myself unbelievably lucky to have had the chance to hear that for myself on an actual copy of the record.

Copious and heartfelt thanks to Koglek for that opportunity. Rest assured, I’ll be storing Seven somewhere with an easy line of sight.

Colour Haze, “House of Rushammon” from Seven (1998)

Colour Haze’s website

Elektrohasch Schallplatten