Neu!
Neu! '75
[Astralwerks]
Rating: 8.5
And so we reach endgame. Sure, the Düsseldorf duo of Klaus Dinger and Michael
Rother would release subsequent material after Neu! '75: a handful of
compilations, one live album, and the fruits of the duo's half-hearted
mid-80's studio reunion (both of the latter two releases being bitterly
contested by Rother). But there can be little doubt that Neu! '75
serves as the group's final statement. So what happens when the new starts
to grow old, when a band whose very name was an exclamation of novelty,
begins to age? It's a curious fold of thought: a visionary band in the
process of maturation, but an old band that has become new to us.
Perhaps Neu never grew old; perhaps the world simply got wise to their sound.
By 1975, Kraftwerk-- the group that spawned them-- had released Autobahn
and gained international pop celebrity; Can had already mastered the music of
propulsive ambience on Future Days; Faust had recorded the track that
would give the entire genre its name; and punk was fomenting in the dives of
England and America. 1975 was the year of Eno's Another Green World,
and the year David Bowie began departing from his plastic soul phase in
search of a synthetic futurism. Neu had been in hibernation for three years
since the budget crisis-turned-serendipity of their tweaky sophomore effort.
Neu! '75 may have marked a personal reunion for Dinger and Rother, but
there's little union to be heard. The record's lush ambience masks a primal
tension at the heart, as if Neu were unsure to whom they would be leaving
their legacy: new age or punk. "Isi" is propelled by Dinger's signature
"motorik" percussion, but where we expect Rother's deft, industrialized
guitar, we hear undulating synths and piano lines expanding out in concentric
circles. It's not an engine; it's an ocean.
The somber "See Land" is a similarly organic affair, drawing more on the
"kosmische" sound of Ash Ra Tempel and Rother's own Harmonia project (with
Roedelius and Moebius of Cluster) than the factory aesthetics of Kraftwerk
and Faust. Dinger's sparse, syncopated rhythm treads lightly beneath the
bright, processed lines of Rother's singing guitar. Unfortunately, "See Land"
operates by sheer repetition, a strategy employed to dazzling effect in the
robotics of their earlier albums, but suggestive here of a fundamental
aimlessness. The track dies on a volume fade-out, simply because there was
no tension to resolve. Just drift.
You must reconstruct Neu! '75 in its original incarnation as vinyl in
order to fully appreciate the bruising finality with which "Leb Wohl" would
have concluded the first side. If the first two tracks were somewhat
ambivalent about the preference for ambience over trajectory, "Leb Wohl"
resolves all doubts. Over nine minutes, the track blends plaintive piano,
metronomic percussion, distant organ, and tidal washes beneath Dinger's
almost-spoken vocals. One can think of Talk Talk's artful deployment of
silence as a reference point. There are even moments in the glacial emptiness
of "Leb Wohl" when one half-expects the advent of a Nordic she-male crooning
heavenly in a made-up language.
And just when you've resigned yourself to this new ethereal Neu, the
industro-punk "Hero" snarls in with all the dirt and blues of the early
Stones. Dinger growls out indecipherables somewhere between Jagger and
Rotten, while Rother's burning guitar is finally emancipated from the benign
oppression of the synths. It's the motorik of the world on the verge of a
fuel crisis.
That insurgency is sustained throughout the lengthy "E-Musik," driven by the
alien percussion of drums run through a phase shifter. The guitar skitters
like pure electricity, while exploratory synths assume their proper place on
the horizon. "E-Musik" has perfected the equation: the acid-fried expanse of
their debut distilled through the radical proto-punk of their second album,
and punctuated by spells of dreamy ambience. All that remains is the primal
shove of "After Eight," perhaps the grittiest and meanest sounding track the
duo ever put its name on. Instead of a victory lap, Neu throttled into
overdrive.
And finally, breakdown. The world was catching up just as the engine blew
out. And there wouldn't be another chance for Neu to show that they were
still ten steps ahead of everybody else. The world was getting wise to their
sound. So would you have been surprised then when the phone rang just a year
after this record was released? Seems David Bowie had been swapping the band's LPs
with Eno lately. He phoned up Rother, mentioned something about Berlin, a
new sound, some project with Eno, and hey, maybe you'd like to sit in? The
project, of course, would be Low. And Rother declined.
-Brent S. Sirota