Full of Energy

At approximately the same time as these brief notes to accompany the second export album of Citron were taking shape, the outfit were marking ten years of existence (they got together in 1976, in the city of Ostrava). While their previous LP, Tropic Of Cancer (Supraphon 1981, 1113 3078 H) mapped Citron's ambitions at the beginning of the current decade, the album Full Of Energy displays the band's mid-1980s output. This is an era when Citron have been playing for just over two years in a new lineup, with only the drummer. Radim Pafizek, the act's driving spirit in the purely musical as well as other terms, remaining of the original personnel.

Throughout their decade an the music scene Citron have never resorted to tactical manoeuvering or compromise. Programmatically and with a sharp sense of purpose, they have played exactly the kind of music which they took up at the outset of their career: an expressive, high-strung rock sound to which some might be likely to attach the label of hard-rock while others that of heavy-metal (the boundaries between the two styles being so fuzzy anyway as to frequently overlap each other or simply merge). Citron's musical language is natural and spontaneous, nothing in it is artificial or make-believe; each tone, whether played or sung, literally exudes a healthy and energetic joy of music-making, proving the band's being tuned to the same wavelength and their untamed desire to play the music that is best suited to their natural feeling.

Citron have been playing exclusively their own material; the bulk of their present program has seen the light in the group's workshop, as product of team effort, and confirms full well that the potential of this music is still far from exhausted or heading for obsolescence.

The present album has already been released by Horus, in the Federal Republic of Germany where Citron made a concert tour in the spring of 1986, jointly with an all-female heavy-metal outfit. Rosy Vista. In summer of the same year, the two acts appeared together in Czechoslovakia.

Within its domain, Citron are the tops on the Czechoslovak rock scene, scoring regular victories both on the country's bestselling record charts, and in live concerts, each of them a sell-out long in advance. If the very title of Citron's second export album advertises energy, on listening to what the band have to offer you will agree this is no mere publicity stunt: Citron's music is indeed virtually charged with energy... The act and all the others who have had their share in putting the disc together only wish that the spark of its sheer vigour should get through to its audience.