You probably know 33⅓ by now -- they do book-length essays about albums of interest. It's a pretty broad-ranging series - Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love has had a round, as have (arguably equally) asinine rock standards like Let It Be, Use Your Illusion, Wowee Zowee etc. That's deliberately antagonistic, but for good reason -- the series is arguably part of establishing what 'canonical' music albums are, for which it serves a useful purpose -- while also re-asserting the existing canon, it's done good work in expanding it, or recognising that the average listener has a wider idea of canon now.
Einstürzende Neubauten
12 posts
Over the years the band's sound has changed, but has still remained uniquely ‘them’; no other band sounds like Neubauten. When I first saw them they were the sound of the dynamite exploding the collapsing new building -- now they are more akin to the dust and debris falling to the ground in slow motion.
Each subsequent album teetering between this rough'n'smooth threshold, the best a balancing act between and this latest sparsely packaged artefact, revisiting that Zickzack spidery black text and that ever-present dancing primitive swamped here by an acidic yellow, harbours some seriously lovely junkyard / alt-pop moments.
Potomak It’s been twelve years since the last, proper, Einstürzende Neubauten album, whatever that means. They’ve been detached from the music industry for a while now, pioneering some kind of multiple fan feedback mechanism, which I guess predated crowd-sourcing and kept them away from the supposed struggles associated with label […]
London 4 May 2017 Einstürzende Neubauten are a band very close to my heart — indeed, they reside in tattoo form on my left arm, so it’s literally a matter of inches. So I am delighted when, having given up on seeing what’s billed as a Greatest Hits set due to […]
London 19 November 2014 As one does before seeing a show by a well-loved band, I muse on my own personal history pertaining to this group as I make my way to Camden to see Einstürzende Neubauten perform their latest release Lament. I can work out in approximations that I […]
Potomak As a commemoration of the first world war, Einstürzende Neubauten could have so easily brewed up a mangled litany of compressed air screams, torn metal and had done with it. The opening track certainly has a good go. Aptly entitled “Kriegsmachinerie,” it’s a track that flash-floods the band’s pyroactive past […]
Label: Mute Format: CD Mute have reissued Einstürzende Neubauten‘s 1993 album Tabula Rasa along with the singles that were released at the time. These include the French, Japanese, and English versions of “Blume”. Anita Lane provides the vocals on the English version. Its a smart album full of lyrical games and […]
The Forum, London 3 April 2004 If one thing in life is true, it that people get older, bands get mellower – the noise and sound and fury of an Industrial youth flows into a neatly-tailored sartorial elegance and a penchant for slower numbers. Or so it is with Einstürzende […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Okay, so it may be the wrong time, given recent events, for a band whose name translates as “Collapsing New Buildings” to release an album called Strategies Against Architecture III, but, heedless of a Stockhausen-style backlash, those wonderfully inventive German sonic terrorists (again, perhaps not a […]
The Astoria, London 4th June 2000 Even just standing waiting for Neubauten to arrive on stage for this Twentieth Anniversary tour (!) is something of an enjoyable experience, thanks to the wilfully obtuse nature of some of the instrumentation and sundry kit arrayed on the platform. So ignoring the usual […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Neubauten. Yeah, you know, Neubauten. (Somehow, after all this time, it’s kind of easy to forget that there ever was an “Einstürzende” in there at all; we are, indeed, on second-name terms. Thorough familiarity.) Because everyone knows what Neubauten do. They hit stuff, make a racket, […]