Kev Rowland I must confess I hadn’t realised that Lucifer’s Friend had reformed a few years ago, so this album was a pleasant surprise. Founder members John Lawton (vocals), Peter Hesslein (guitar, keyboards) and Dieter Horns (bass) are there strutting their stuff again. Original drummer Joachim "Addi" Rietenbach has passed away, so his place was taken by Stephan Eggert, while keyboard player Peter Hecht declined to return so on the album keyboards are provided by Hesslein. Any fan of classic rock will know about Lucifer’s Friend, which for me I always think of as a German Uriah Heep, for musical reasons as well as of course that Lawton replaced Byron in that band.

It must be said that playing this album is like putting on a warm blanket, it is instantly comforting, and Lawton (if Wikipedia is to be believed) shows no sign at all of being 73 years old! His voice is as powerful as it has ever been, and the ten numbers he has written with Hesslein shows a band who are determined to make their presence felt as opposed to resting on their laurels. It has been fifty years since Lawton left Stonewall and joined the members of The German Bonds in forming Asterix, which became Lucifer’s Friend’, but those decades have flown by on this classic hard rock album which could have been recorded in their heyday. The guitars are as tough, plenty of riffs, while the keyboard provide levity, but whatever is going on underneath is lifted by the superb vocals of Lawton. I dare anyone to play “Call The Captain” and not smile at its’ annoying infectious simplicity – one can imagine this being a radio hit in the Eighties, and that is probably as up to date as the band gets, but who cares? Classic rock, from a band who really were there at the beginning, this is for fans of bands as diverse as Uriah Heep and UFO, and everything in-between. If ever an album defined “fun” then this is it.

progshine I got this CD a while ago on my mailbox and I had mixed feelings and I always have with old bands' new releases.

It turned out that this is a compilation that also brings us 4 brand new tracks from the core of Lucifer's Friends line up.

Now, let me say that this CD had everything to be a 5 stars. Lucifer's Friend is a great (and underrated) band with some amazing material and a great singer (John Lawton). And indeed, the music here is absolutely amazing, both the old tracks and surprinsingly the new 4 tracks too!

The fact this is going to be a 4 stars to me is the way they packaged everything. TO begin with there's only ten tracks on the compilation (CD 1). According to the CD booklet the tracks were chosen after a research in the web and the band thought that these were the tracks the fans liked most... this is dubious. In the end they have 4 songs out of the first album, one song out of Where The Groupies Killed The Blues, 2 songs out of Mind Exploding, 1 song out of Banquet and 2 songs out of Mean Machine. That means that there's no songs from I'm Just a Rock 'n' Roll Singer, Good Time Warrior, Sneak Me In or Sumo Grip for that matter and the CD is only 47 minutes long. The band could have packed the CD1 with more songs, songs from all the studio albums, etc.

Then we have a second CD with the 4 new tracks and it clocks only 17 minutes long. Now, if you have 47 minutes in one CD and 17 on the other, why not pack them together? Aesthetic reasons? Well, CHerry Red (their distributor) is selling it for the price of a single CD so I think it doesn't matter in the end, but for practical reasons it should have been better off with a single disc.

But hey, don't let my ramblings fool you, Awakening is well worth it buying, specially if you don't own their old studio records. For the old fans the 4 new songs are high quality material that brings the old Lucifer's Friend to a new era and John Lawton still sings amazingly well!

voila_la_scorie I am surprised it took me this many years to know about this album. There's proto-metal and then there's proto-metal. You have your heavy psych bands, your heavy blues-based bands, your jazzy prog bands, and then you get an album like this which is all about rocking out with heavy bar-chord riffs, howling vocals, and a Hammond organ that could raise an eyebrow or two of Jon Lord's (RIP).

To sum up the sound simply, this is a large dose of Uriah Heep circa "Salisbury" and "Look at Yourself" heavily emphasizing the rocking heavy side but going more for the aggressive sonic assault of Deep Purple In Rock and hinting at times of Dio-era Rainbow. I am really impressed how every song goes for guitar distortion and totally avoids any light weight numbers. There are no slow songs, no acoustic numbers, not even any numbers with a clean lead guitar. But each song is distinct enough so that I find myself looking forward to the heavy riff to be found in every song. Oh, sure, some songs are better than others. But I have no disappointments.

A few words need to be said for John Lawton, whose vocal prowess and power make it easy to tell why he would be able to secure a job with Uriah Heep later on. He really lets a couple of good screams loose on the title track. It's rare to find a singer with such metal talent so early on in metal's history. At this time (1970) Ian Gillan was all the news. Well, John Lawton fits right in there.

All in all, I'd say this album really has a strong place in metal history because the music really fits the bill. This is no three-chord garage rock band and no Led Zeppelin imitation. If you like the heaviest of Uriah Heep's early songs and wish they'd done more you would be doing yourself a favour by checking out this beast. The sound quality is there, too. A nice lost (?) classic.

Warthur With Peter Hecht's stalwart Hammond organ underpinning a set of heavy psych-prog compositions, you could almost be forgiven for mistaking the debut album by Lucifer's Friend for a lost album from Deep Purple's In Rock lineup. In fact, I think it's markedly more consistent than In Rock-era Deep Purple ever were, with the band successfully establishing an intriguingly dark atmosphere. At other points - particularly with John Lawton's vocals in the picture - the band resemble a somewhat more Satanic Uriah Heep. For those who like the heavier side of psych-prog or the trippier side of hard rock or proto-metal, this is a real treat.

Warthur It seems that in the process of making Banquet Lucifer's Friend must have been listening to a lot of early Santana, because opening track Spanish Galleon - one of the album's two major centrepieces - sounds uncannily like Santana's Latin-infused jazzy psychedelic rock. Although Lucifer's Friend are mainly known as trailblazers for metal, this album really isn't that heavy, but it's still a grand showcase for Peter Hesslein's guitar skills and in general offers an interesting listen which expands and builds on the sort of musical territory Santana had opened up on their first four or so albums. Not essential, but not one to overlook by any means.