Violence, Snail Mail, Faangs, Damon Albarn, Idles: Abgehört

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Band violence, singer Wagner (M.)

Photo:

Magnus Winter

Album of the week:

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Album cover of »Paradies«

In the end, Patrick Wagner submitted. So far, the singles of his band violence have appeared almost exclusively in a small vinyl edition or on their own bandcamp page: Nobody wants to hear the bad-tempered stuff anyway, thought the eternal punk and industry skeptic. But last week he released another album, even a double album, the second half of which brings together all eleven singles from the past five years. There are ten new pieces with which singer and guitarist Wagner, guitarist Helen Henfling and bassist Jasmin Rilke want to make "misery danceable", as Wagner writes in an illustrated booklet.

»Paradies« is the inventory of a doggedly resistant project - and perhaps the most powerful German rock record of the year. A testament of refusal to function, of self-disgust and the recognition of one's own wretchedness in the midst of capitalist optimization compulsions and narratives, to which there has long been no ideological counterweight that is not cynically or contemptuously ridiculed.

Against this surrender, the music of violence lets a cauldron of industrial rock, post-punk, guitars dragging over metal and whipping drum computer beats simmer. It seems like a desperate wake-up call from the past of existential fear wave sounds, you can hear Suicide, Gang of Four, Ministry, Sisters of Mercy. "We wanted the instruments being played to be closer to the cold of the machine," says Wagner. The machine in which he is a tormentor. Long time.

The 51-year-old is a scene veteran. He once moved from the Palatinate to Berlin, where he founded the indie labels Kitty-yo and Louisville, which were popular in the 1990s. With the briefly celebrated band Surrogat, he also made music himself, adrenaline rock, from which loud guitar riffs and caustic irony spurted out in songs like "Give me everything" or "Berlin loves you". In the noughties, when the city gave itself over to the Easyjet set, then financial ruin, depression: poor, but not sexy. Last way out? Violence. Not the bloody, real one, but the brutal, musical one.

“We did it, we got there. You are happy. You ask what is that? ”Wagner is now feverishly with his most beautiful Hui-Buh voice in“ Submission ”. The band rumbling to a standstill after this question. "Nothing" is the disillusioning answer. Then the music picks up its rusty rattle chains again, Construction Time Again - but the product, the success is just an empty shell. Even sex is a bad show of performance. “Jahrhundertfick” is the most danceable song on the album, but also the most off-putting. Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour.

What to do? "Become duller," as a particularly dull thumping song demands? Looking for "paradise" in a ten-minute drug delirium? Or would you prefer to leave everything right away, like in the MRI thunderstorm "Is it about to die"? "So this is your fucking soul, your life, accidental and manageable," Wagner drags in it: "You cling to a spark of happiness and your suffering. The whole thing goes away. ”Even if you dare to go shopping again, it stabs again quickly, the pain (“ Sometimes I venture out with people ”). He only finds redemption at "3:35" at night, at the very end, in a surprising, deeply touching electro ballad, sleepless next to his companion in bed: staring into the darkness. No dawn dawns, thoughts turn in circles. And yet, in fact, love: "I'm starting to believethat for me there is tomorrow «.

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violence

Paradise [Vinyl LP]

Label: Clouds Hill (Warner)

Number of discs: 2

Availability: This item will be released on December 3, 2021. Pre-order now.

Label: Clouds Hill (Warner)

Number of discs: 2

Availability: This item will be released on December 3, 2021. Pre-order now.

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11/12/2021 6:12 p.m.

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This uncomfortable but cathartic album is definitely a happy ending for violence.

But the late submission to the rules of the publishing industry has its price: The vinyl deliveries from »Paradies« could not be delivered on time because »the fucking press shop doesn't deliver the albums.

Sorry for that, ”Wagner wrote in frustration last week.

Probably all occupied by Adele's large 500,000-piece order.

Indies don't stand a chance there.

The machine never sleeps.

So it's all the better that Patrick Wagner is still awake.

Listened briefly:

Snail Mail - "Valentine"

Lindsey Jordan sang "I'm in full control / I'm not lost / Even when it's love" in 2018. The US songwriter was 18 years old at the time and became an indie rock star with her celebrated debut "Lush". Too much, too fast: Jordan lost control - and had to go into rehab. Now she returns with the musically refined, but even more intense album »Valentine«. She dares to have more calm, strings and fresh pop appeal, where before 90s grunge simmered stale. The lyrics of her feather-light tumbling mid-tempo melancholy are still about fragility and addiction, the one for love and the one for alcohol - the hangover after Valentine's Day mourned in loneliness. "I've got the devil in me", Jordan sings in "Ben Franklin" - but also many brightly sparkling songs,To keep this devil and the depression in check.

Faangs - "Teeth Out"

Good pop music always has something vampire-like about it: it sucks cultural juices from all possible sources in a cheeky and outrageous way. With Faangs (read: »Fangs«, meaning fangs), Melissa Storwick has acquired the appropriate artist name. »Teeth Out« is the name of their first album with quick-witted three-minute songs. The 23-year-old Canadian, a former child star, learned early on to adapt to the needs of the music industry. Writing effective pop songs in Berlin with the Hitimpulse producer team (including Felix Jaehn, Ava Max). In LA she reinvented herself as a femme fatale battered by quirks and quirks and now drifts through nightly excesses in songs like "Huh" on contemporary beats.In her videos, with shrill haute couture and wild grimaces, she portrays a revenant of Lady Gaga and Nina Hagen, while her scratchy voice is reminiscent of teen idol Billie Eilish. If their laconic mindfulness music is the soundtrack for the Fridays for Future demos, then the hedonistic kamikaze pop by Faangs could be the sweet poison for the party weekend afterwards.

Damon Albarn - "The Nearer The Mountain, More Pure The Stream flows"

Like singer-songwriter colleague Tori Amos, ex-Blur singer Damon Albarn also withdrew to the English Riviera (Devon) in Corona mode to work broodingly and gloomily on his new solo album.

With the title based on a poem by John Clare, the work was actually supposed to be a long orchestral piece about the scenic beauty of Iceland.

Instead, crystalline pop ballads and billo beats from the hobbit cottage.

Sometimes disarmingly brittle or sublime as in "The Cormorant" and "Daft Wader", too often experimentally jazzy ("Combustion", "Esja"), sometimes banal ("Royal Morning Blue", "The Tower of Montevideo").

The Tindersticks smile mildly, Roxy Music lent the saxophone, Nick Drake greets from the Pink Moon - but "Everyday Robots", Albarn's solo monument, remains unmatched.

Idles - »Crawler«

Still the mods with the awareness craze: on their fourth album, which comes just a year after the excellent »Ultra Mono«, the British idles dedicate themselves to trauma therapy after the lockdown. This time the hip-hop specialist Kenny Beats (including Vince Staples) was hired as a producer, who not only effectively reduced the slogan songs of the punk rockers to the essentials (LOT of drums, guitar riffs, hoarse shouting by singer Joe Talbot), but also obviously in "The Wheel" was also staged by the German post-punks Trio. In the end, the beat? "Sunday You Need Love Monday Be Alone", safe! But why not? You can hardly find better inspiration than their debut album, which has just turned 40 years old. Trio's anarchic humor comes in this grimest and sinister Idles album about car accidents,Drug addiction and Stockholm Syndrome unfortunately too short. But that’s no less effective crawling under the skin, these "crawlers". (8.2)