Now is the time on Pitchfork when we dance! As part of a court-ordered apology for unleashing Fatboy Slim on an unsuspecting universe, the Astralwerks label has undertaken the incredibly noble task of re-releasing the first three albums by the legendary Düsseldorf duo Neu. The albums are to be played round the clock at Astralwerks HQ; the cheap Crayon graphics of the compact disc are to be pinned on shirts like scarlet letters; all employees are to dance the Robot at all times. We need to praise Neu like we should.
As far back as I can remember, the first three Neu albums languished in the Import-only Impossible; the Japanese letters on the sleeves were incomprehensible, but also painfully explicit: prohibitively expensive, they screamed. And now, their stateside release has opened up unimagined worlds to the ears, cheap!
And like the band's moniker promises, this music is new. Strange and visionary, but so incredibly familiar. Why? Because a record originally cut in 1972 by a splinter off the indomitable Kraftwerk has seeped into the musical consciousness of a generation; its influence is everywhere. Listening to Neu recalls that giddy, pointless thrill of standing at the Four Corners in the southwestern United States. What's the big deal? Well, nothing, really, except maybe the sense of being in many places at once. That's Neu: standing with cocked German eyebrows at the nexus of shimmering space rock, processed psychedelia, mechanical kraut, and wonderfully libidinal disco.
Upon hearing "Hallo Gallo," the first track on Neu, a friend of mine started inadvertently humming an organ line from Tortoise's "Djed." That quiet gesture summed up the album for me: listening to the past and hearing so much of the future. But Neu is no mere missing link. "Hallo Gallo" is a masterpiece of rhythm: tight drums, funky guitar scratch, a coolly insistent bassline, futuro synths, and effects-laden guitar slinging wide acid-fried launches into deep space. Neu is remarkably economical where its influences cultivate excess: the exploratory guitar and keyboards discover new aural landscapes where the pioneers of prog would remain hours blissfully adrift. "Hallo Gallo" is intelligent dance music in every sense of the term: it's the ass inviting the mind out onto the floor. Nobody leads; both are simply in motion.
"Sonderangebot" is a murky soup of noise and silence: an interlude of clanging cymbals, and ambient fuzz, a kind of breathing nebula. The song bleeds darkly into "Weißensee," a droning parade of dirty, cone-filtered guitar that anticipates the pastoral psychedelia of Flying Saucer Attack and Hochenkeit. "Negativland" opens in jackhammer drills and coalesces into a lock-tight, bass-driven martial progression of stabbing guitar and industrial noise: it's dark but strangely danceable. Something like krautpunk: syncopation, cerebral and serrated.
Neu is music with the proper documentation: it passes from one musical realm to another without the jackbooted border patrol so much as blinking an eye: this is sound with the highest level security clearance. And when it shifts from one sound to the next, it never winks at you with postmodern irony, never elbows you in the ribs to let you in on the joke. Neu is truly a citizen of the musical universe, at home everywhere and everywhere at once. And Astralwerks' re-release of this phenomenal debut could only serve as a long overdue recognition of this fact. For perhaps without Neu, there would have been no Astralwerks; worse, without Neu there may have been no Pitchfork. Neu anticipates us all. Now who's your daddy? Come on, say it!
