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.
