Einstürzende Neubauten - Perpetuum Mobile

The focus has shifted from annihilation to progression: flux, transit, change. This is the new leitmotiv. Catastrophe is still a part of this, but it's more natural -- metal has been replaced with air and water. Decadence and decay, life and blooming, all are vital elements of "the perpetual motion machine."

Einstürzende Neubauten's metamorphosis, from 1981's Kollaps to Halber Mensch, which many revere as the group's masterpiece, to Tabula Rasa and on, has been one of the most distinguished and intriguing of that of any band, let alone any industrial band. Their earliest albums were notoriously visceral works that sounded as if they were collapsing in upon themselves, imploding into the vortex of their creativity. Standard bass guitar provided the sinew with which to hold together sounds of power tools, clanking metal, and a plethora of other such preternatural instrumentation. They were indeed noisy, but not without a finely tuned sense of intricate structure (especially on Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.) -- even sounds of shattering glass were perfectly rhythmic. The band's name -- German for "collapsing new buildings" -- and the mission statement "Destruction is not negative -- you must destroy to build" pretty much said it all.

With each new album, Blixa Bargeld (also a former member of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds) and his band have incorporated more and more subtleties and actual chord progressions into the music, and now we have Perpetuum Mobile -- arguably Neubauten's most fragile work on the whole yet. It is certainly not without its jarring, cacophonous moments, but many of the songs have the most starkly restrained, progressive feel of anything they've done so far. One might get the impression, given their motto, that most of the destroying was done early in their career, and with their past several albums they've been piecing something together a little more poignantly. The opener, "Ich Gehe Jetzt," is almost serenely tribal, vaguely reminiscent of Peter Gabriel's more exotic creations. Its beat is thudded out gently by the (unusually) usual plastic pipes and air compressors while Bargeld sings almost quiescently in his native German. This is followed with the thirteen-minute title track, which seems to be an effort seeking to amalgamate all phases of the band's evolution. "Ozean und Brandung," serving as a sort of intermezzo, might be construed as the exemplification of the album's theme in pure sound: air compressors rush and reverberate, eroding all debris with warm wind.

This is not the album I would recommend to someone new to Einstürzende Neubauten, but for those who have already become familiar with their more volatile and frenzied incarnations and enjoy the more recent Silence is Sexy will surely find Perpetuum Mobile rewarding. At the very least, it shows that they have not yet even begun to run out of ideas, more than two decades on from their beginnings. It's certainly a contender for a spot in my top ten albums of 2004.


Links:
Buy it at amazon.com
neubauten.org
mute.com