The influence of early but heavy psychedelic British rock is overwhelming on the debut album by this Danish trio, which owes specifically apparent debts to
Jimi Hendrix and
Cream. It has some of the surface trappings of late-'60s records featuring
Hendrix and
Clapton in the squealing distorted guitars, phasing, and overall transmutation of the blues to a hard rock format. The opening "Overture -- Take Warning" alone sounds like it's determined to stretch the white noise effects that
Hendrix used to open songs with a flourish to full-track length. What the album's missing -- unlike most of the recordings by
Hendrix and
Cream -- is good songwriting, let alone the kind of classics churned out by those role models. They certainly don't lack ambition, as three of the songs use lyrics by Walt Whitman, and they try their hand at a nine-minute jam-type thing, "April '68," as well as a hard blues-rock interpretation of
Bob Dylan's then-recent "Down the Cove." But it's the shortest song, "To You," that's the most focused and appealing, very much recalling the shortest and most focused songs of
Cream.