Death Walks Behind You

Atomic Rooster’s second album is its best-known, possibly because of its nightmare-inducing cover art (William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar) but also because it contains an actual hit single, “Tomorrow Night,” which hit #11 in the UK. The band was led by mad visionary keyboardist Vincent Crane, bolstered by guitarist John Du Cann and drummer Paul Hammond; his lyrics are bleak, paranoid, and despairing, but the music fluctuated between doomy proto-metal (the nearly eight-minute title track) and grooving, R&B-inflected rock jams like “Tomorrow Night,” which features some of 1970’s best cowbell playing. “Sleeping For Years” is a Led Zeppelin-ish stomp, and “I Can’t Take No More” seems like caveman garage-rock at first but reveals the sophistication of mid ’70s power pop (listen carefully and you may hear a prefiguring of the Cars’ “Dangerous Type”).