There's one heck of a conceptual framework behind Einstürzende Neubauten's Alles Wieder Offen. By now, if you're at all interested in the band, you've heard the story: The classic proto-industrial Berlin quintet funded the album via subscriptions to their website. Kind of like In Rainbows, but before Radiohead did it, and in reverse. Subscribers had the ability to critique the album while it was being made, suggesting a final sequence or telling the band to pick up a scrap they decided to leave behind on the studio floor. Additionally, a subscription gave the lucky EN fan access to webcam performances and rehearsals. Again, tres Radiohead. The subscriber service isn't new to EN's practice: Their last "official" release was 2004's Perpetual Motion, but the group's self-released more than ten collections via the website between Perpetual and Alles. Increasing the meta, some of that material made its way-- chopped, diced, or re-envisioned-- onto Alles.
And that's only part of the frame. If you go to the band's web page, they provide usual EN-style background info-- source material, anecdotes, and/or inter-oeuvre references-- for the 10 tracks. For instance, "Susej" is based on a piece for rhythm guitar vocalist Blixa Bargeld recorded in a flooded cellar in Hamburg in the early 1980s. We also learn Alles features the band's first use of a box of aluminum sticks as an instrument (can you guess which tune?). There's too much to absorb-- you could spend nights reading the supporting materials (including the lyrics handily translated into English) without finding the time to listen to the music. Thing is, when you do get around to listening, the background isn't all that interesting or integral. In fact, it actually takes away from collection's sonic purity. It makes it feel too self-important. Alles works wonderfully as music when divorced from its press releases: The collection definitely includes uninteresting passages, but on the whole, it also introduces some of the band's most sublime work to date.
This isn't the Neubauten of your childhood. There are moments of dissonance (see the anti-climax of the 9-minute "Unvollständigkeit") and the sheet metal's all over the place, but from "Die Wellen"'s opening pulsation swell to the strummed and then screeched finale "Ich Warte", it's a relatively smooth ride. On "Die Wellen" ("The Waves"), for example, Bargeld whispers soothingly. He does that sorta thing often. This is the first time you hear him on the record, and as the vibrations accrue volume and a little bit of violence-- guitar, organ, piano, drums viola, and cello are interwoven-- he grows angstier, but remains controlled all the way to the final poetic exclamation: "I hold my own, shout at each single wave: Are you staying?/ Are you staying?/ Are you staying, or what?" It's like a tuning of strings before an orchestra starts. Then it cuts.
The following track, "Nagorny Karabach", has a mellow, gentle, 70s proggy feel. The song's somewhat reminiscent of Fritz Ostermayer's Kitsch Concrete, or, more intriguingly, the recent nighttime baroque of Ulver, another European shape-shifter mellowing ecstatically with age. It includes an e-bow guitar (which I could hear), a jet turbine (maybe), and samples from a 16th century church organ (which I read about on their site). Lyrically, there are "Two large black ravens/ Devouring the plums in the tree" and a man in exile, "hiding in Nagorny Karabakh." Like a lot of the tunes here, it reminds me of Shakespeare, if only because EN wrestles with huge human themes.
Maybe the most surprising song is "Let's Do it a Dada", which could seriously work as a dancefloor hit. When placed beside the work of some of the more adventurous producers on pop radio, it feels like clattering electroclash, complete with a huge chorus. (Wonder what the Dada would look like as an actual dance step? If anything, hopefully there's a lobster suit involved.) There are a number of other interesting moments, like the nursery rhyming "Ich Hatte Ein Wort", which reminded me of old Siltbreeze noisemakers the Shadow Ring: we hear storytelling voices over a clamoring, but skeletal background, muted rock guitar, and an infectiously insane "de de de de de" hook. "Von Wegen" has a similar feel, but seemingly stays quieter-- midnight rumbles, nocturnal taps-- until Bargeld pilots into a "wegan" loop, repeating the word, as though mantra. After which, strings cascade with the clamor of metal alongside downward-drifting vocalisms (bum, bum, bum), and this line: "Dissolve me like sugar/ If you find the time for it." A love song! Sort of.
Maybe it's coincidental, or I'm over doing it because of all the materials they attach to the album, but EN save what could be read as the album's moral (or punchline) for the ending. "Ich Warte"-- which the website tells us "probably includes more untranslatable German puns than any EN song"-- starts with a pastoral guitar and Bargeld's gently spoken words; somewhat surprisingly, it shifts into crazy ride-em-cowboy noise-slapping. You get the sense Neubauten's reminding us they don't plan to go quietly. Some of the lyrics, minus those German puns? "I'm waiting for there to be nothing left to wait for/ Life is not an error, not error and music/ I'm waiting/ I'm waiting still." That restlessness keeps the band ferocious even when they're singing these semi-lullabies.
Einstürzende Neubauten have been together for more than three decades, and it's satisfying watching (and listening to) them at the height of their powers, constantly using an exploratory virtuosity to push their practice into ever newer realms. The album's title might be translated "All Open Again," but no real need for that "again."
