The band name is (possibly) a play on their instruments rather than their trade — it’s a trio of Finnish men playing on a bunch of junk instruments — a repurposed laundry rack, a wash tub bass, that sort of thing. It’s mixed by Einstürzende Neubauten‘s Alexander Hacke who, as you’re probably aware, knows a thing or two about ekeing elegance from repurposed industrial shrapnel.
Despite the nominal similarity in choice of instruments, this is a fair distance from Neubauten. A sequence of sometimes dance-ish, indie-ish numbers, all driven by some ungodly monster of a “drumkit”, and lyrics somewhere in the realm of post-Internet ennui. It all fits together – something like a quasi-primitive take on the indie disco, resolutely international with lyrics in English, German and French.
There’s apparently been a ten-year gap between this and the last record, which makes me wonder if this isn’t in some ways a massively laborious effort — while the tracks largely sound effortlessly worked out, it’s surprising how much variation they get out of what are essentially fairly limited non-instruments. There’s a bit of effects — auto wah and distortions here and there — but there’s a clever relationship between what the instruments “are” and “how they sound” (Neubauten’s most telling influence, perhaps?). What I’m saying is that these instruments should largely be fairly tonally limited, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped them throwing together ten tracks of varied stuff. I’d say this possibly isn’t the record that you’re after if you’re looking for Neubauten-esque junkyard thrills — it’s too far away, and it’s by no means as outwardly confrontational as the Kollaps-era. But what it does do is turn a world of modern paranoia and anxiety and a baffling array of cleverly concocted instruments liberated from their hum-drum lives of cleaning and domesticating.-Kev Nickells-
