Tool - "Fear Inoculum"
(Volcano / RCA / Sony, since 30th of August)
It sometimes happens that an album appears out of the fog like a battleship between pedal boats and stand-up paddlers. Powerful, menacing and with great repression, from another time. And metal, clear.
There are people who have waited 13 years for a new work by Tool. Truly waiting, as one may long for the return of a comet. Who waits, wants something. At best, more of what the Californian group has earned on a mere four records since 1993, a certain reputation: tacts as puzzling as the lyrics, tribal meandering and dry pace. As front man a diva like Maynard James Keenan (not to be confused with John Maynard Keynes), as a sideline winemaker and also involved in projects like A Perfect Circle or Puscifer.
There was also some kind of knack in Metal elsewhere, a lot anyway. A narrowing of both aesthetic principles has rarely been heard in such a consummation as on "Lateralus," "Aenima," or "10,000 Days." From time to time, Tool composed songs based on mathematical sequences by medieval scholar Leonardo Fibonacci. Such things. King Crimson and Black Sabbath proudly wave from the sideline.
With a running time of one and a half hours and only seven songs, six of which do not fall short of the ten-minute mark, "Fear Inoculum" meets all expectable expectations. At the same time, it serves needs that are unlikely to exist at a time when "relevant" pop music has to work off either ghetto or gender.
Tool knows that, "Warrior struggling to remain revelant," Keenan sings in "Invincible," but deconstruction is not her thing. On the contrary, there is still an architectural access maintained here. It is very old, very white, very masculine and in parts very boring music.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
Technical expertise is shown here again ad nauseam. No memorable riff, no memorable melody. And not a song that precedes not to erratic Rythythmus lichen and provocative graduality its own exposé, which unfolds in the following eternities, auftürmt, varied and finally unloaded in a redeeming complexity thunderstorm. There's plenty of room to breathe in instrumental clearings in the thicket, flat sketches in Dark Ambient.
The concurrent rage of classics such as "Schism" or "Sober" is still present, the turrets of the battleship cruiser are ready to fire - with the exception of the quarter-hour "7empest", but preferably only at the end of meticulous explorations of psychedelic climes. It may even be Danny Carey, soon to be 60 years old, sometimes experimentally testing, as 2019 could sound something as hopelessly untimely as a drum solo ("Chocolate Chip Trip").
Of course, one must deny the Strebertum, the Progressive, the masculine of this music confidently as a frickelfaschistoid. But if one just hears past it rather than exactly, "Fear Inoculum" spreads as a result of intellectual and athletic effort - a surprising calm. Then Tool smell more like incense than sweat. The epic time this album takes is at the same time time it gives away. And that's actually nice. (6.5) Arno Frank
Niels Frevert - "cleaning light"
(Greenland / Rough Trade, from 6th September)
"The Frevert feeling is back," a YouTube user apparently wrote very happily as the first comment under the video "Still the music," a single from Niels Frevert's new album "Putzlicht". Probably that's one of the nicest compliments one can make to a musician, any artist: that there is a certain feeling that only he can create that is directly linked to him and his voice, his words, his art: Ah , the!
In this respect, Niels Frevert, who eternally, as an insider tip honored musicians and songwriters from Hamburg, at 51 years actually achieved everything. The format radio, the charts, the great public, things that Frevert wanted to try to re-sound his sound on the last album, all of that is important to the stupid, shabby things you need, money and security, for example. You can not talk it down. But what counts is, in the end, that there are people out there who can convey a feeling like no one else is capable of: a Frevert feeling.
We have already described in detail to "paradise of the last things", from which this feeling can exist, who likes, can read it here. Frevert is one of the best songwriters in this language area, he does that - for a long time with Nationalgalerie, since 22 years solo. But after 2014, as his record label writes, the words were suddenly gone, he did not touch the guitar for months, the crisis was there. What was it? Is private.
What you need to know, Frevert says in his new songs, "And you no longer dare to feel your way over the path, and your courage also leaves you," he sings, and finally, "If the thing gets too close to you, if yours Heart is in ruins, is still there, still the music. "
So it was she who caught him again, when life had left him out at a corner where he suddenly did not know where he was. "I went down the stream until it was a river," he sings in another piece, "I was looking for words for something that was not on the road of words."
The music he found along with his new producer Philipp Steinke (including Boy, Revolverheld), drives on massive drums like a train that picks up speed again or that "running engine", the songs of the album with Prelude and final drama together management plows. The tender strings of past albums have almost disappeared, instead dominated battered piano chords and powerful guitars.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 36
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Playlist on Spotify
1. Algiers: Can The Sub_Bass Speak?
2. Jenny Hval: High Alice
3. Iggy Pop: James Bond
4. Niels Frevert: Still the music
5. Lana Del Rey: Fuck It I Love You
6. Celeste: She's My Sunshine
7. Mahalia: Square 1
8. Bat for Lashes: Feel For You
9. Chelsea Wolfe: Be All Things
10. Ilgen-Nur: Easy Way Out
"Putzlicht" is thus a very dignified, almost too complacent rock album of a classic American style, whose musical style is sometimes reminiscent of Springsteen, sometimes ("iguanas") also on Blumfeld. But it's not a return to nostalgia and nineties for Frevert, it seems like an arrival, even though things in the rear view mirror seem closer than they are when he sings.
This mainstream sound does not have to please you, and there have been better, more intense solo albums by Frevert in the past few years. Nevertheless, one is glad that he found himself, in the bright cleaning light after the dark time, "blue as a lagoon", but also "green like hope", as it is called in "iguanas". Huh, and with such calamities comes through? Well, that too is part of this Frevert feeling. (7.6) Andreas Borcholte
Bat for Lashes - "Lost Girls"
(Awal Recordings / Rough Trade, from 6th of September)
Actually, Natasha Khan alias Bat For Lashes did not want to make a new record after "The Bride". The receptionist of the grim concept album - groom dies on the way to the wedding - was rather restrained, in addition to that Khan was accused of cultural appropriation in connection with her side project Sexwitch.
The London musician, exhausted and annoyed, ended her contract with the EMI and moved to Los Angeles to focus on screenwriting and composing film music. Among other things, she wrote a track for the TV series "Castle Rock", based on stories by Stephen King. Said song is called "Kids In The Dark" and is the first of the (after all) new Bat For Lashes album "Lost Girls".
For many, the title should immediately start the nostalgia machine: Who thinks of Joel Schumacher's adolescence horror movie "The Lost Boys" from 1987, is just right. After her morbid widow epic, Natasha Khan now enters the realm of leather-jacketed undead and vampires - paying tribute to her love of films such as "The Goonies", "ET" and "The Lost Boys", which produces for kids and teens and cult classics were.
Life in LA would have triggered the penchant for this eighties aesthetics in her, Khan said - not only visually, but above all musically: "Lost Girls" is more eighties than the eighties were ever, extended to a clearly feminist perspective. Again it is a concept album centered around the character Nikki Pink, who also embodies Khan in the already released videos. Nikki Pink is accompanied by a gang of undead, "lost" girls, who stand by her when, like in the dark-romantic "Kids In The Dark", she has to leave her very lively crush at dawn.
On the bat-for-lashes album "Two Suns", the main character Pearl served as a catalyst for Khan's heartache, which she suffered at the time of recording. Nikki Pink is now more comic with the vampire theme, but comes close - perhaps with the unrestrained, cheesy synth chords and programmed drum beats that spark great plastic-fantastic passion. Compared to previous albums, "Lost Girls" sounds more colorful, more varied and even danceable, with the big black bat called melancholy flapping over everything, of course.
Khan uses very direct Eighties references: when she sings lines like "I feel for you" or "It hurts so good", but dealing with sounds and styles is open and fortunately hardly awesome. In Khan's imaginary Eighties parallel world (she was born in 1979) comes together, which did not belong together at that time: the dark-melodic Cure guitars in the instrumental "Vampires", for example, which are combined here with a soporific saxophone. Or the melodrama in the spirit of Bonnie Bianco right next to the Khan's role model Kate Hung "The Hunger" - that's really great.
But sometimes it gets along with her, not only the LA-Ode "Peach Sky" overwhelms the Eighties Pastiche to the limit. But what is the name of the Powerballade "Safe Tonight"? "We both know / It's not easy ride". (8.0) Christina Mohr
Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)