When a member of an obscure experimental band goes off and does his own thing by releasing a solo album, I kind of assume it's to get away from the commercial pressures of their main band and take the opportunity to really go round the bend. Hacke's main band is Einsturzende Neubauten, not a band known for their popular appeal or their mainstream ambition, so I figured his solo project would be well and truly bizzare. As it happens I was surprised by how accessible this album was. Sure, there's the occaisional minute long theremin freakout with rhythm provided by an alarm clock, but most of the music is quite catchy.
Hacke displays a wide range of styles. In 'Seven' he combines heavy metal guitars with jazz rhythms (a very cool idea, but Foetus did a whole album of it a few years ago), and 'Per Sempre Butterfly' has a more classical arrangement of strings performing a beautiful movie score type song with a female vocalist. And of course there are the aforementioned avant-garde weirdness.
Neubauten is an awesome band so I had high expectations from this album, but it's exceeded my expectations considerably. Of course, you have to be in the right mood to sit through the weird bits, but as long as you are they're very enjoyable too.
No comments:
Post a Comment