Over the past decade, there has been grumbling that Einstürzende Neubauten, the West Berlin pioneers of industrial noise, have gone soft. Their most passionate followers, after all, aren't known for their enthusiasm about effete things like melody and guitars. And that is understandable. This is a band that has "cooked mud, transformed meat to percussion, and recorded 20,000-volt transformer stations," that has derived its iconoclastic reputation from its long refusal of modern music's comforts and institutions. Cleverly parting with the music-industrial complex, Jewels culls from the third phase of a Supporter Project, where fans funded the production of their previous record, Alles Wieder Offen, in return for a song a month.
First, the band left things to chance, having each member pluck a card from a deck, à la Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies," to determine what their role in each song would be. Each card displayed a "cryptic reference" to some moment or passage or mood that appears in the Neubauten discography. Effectively, this "subversive interpretation game" narrowed the aesthetic range, ensuring a welcome continuity by rooting Jewels in past releases-- the liberties taken here might remind fans of Halber Mensch or the more recent, assaultive Musterhaus series of CDs. Most challenging, and arguably the most rewarding, are a jerky dive into water ("Mei Ro"), a sandwich of whispers and spaceship ambiance ("I Kissed Glenn Gould"), and a buzzsaw's conversation with a robot ("Vicki").
Newcomers may be happy to hear that eccentricity and harshness on that scale isn't sustained across Jewels. This is plain from the first track, "Ich Komme Davon". Hints of melody we found in Silence Is Sexy and Perpetuum Mobile abound here, too, on the opener and the sleekly electronic "Ansonsten Dostojevsky". Even the band's growing sensitivity to space and rhythm, last seen in Grundstück, the second installment in the Supporter Project, surfaces on the record's strongest track. At six and a half minutes, "Die Ebenen werden nicht vermischt" stands out as epically proportioned, a mash-up of Gregorioid chant and musique concrète that calls to mind an oil derrick toppling into a monastery.
For a band that serves as an intermediary stop between trippy Krautrock outfits like Faust and Can on one hand, and bruising sonic nihilists like Test Dept. on the other, Neubauten has eluded pat labels. To be sure, they led the way with industrial music, effectively approaching Home Depot as Guitar Center, but their sound is obviously much more than power-tool improv, and far too varied to stay within one genre, as listeners discover here. Not every song on Jewels is a triumph. But each is a gift, literally, to devotees old and new. Not only a token of appreciation but a reminder that Einstürzende Neubauten's 28-year career leaps from Howitzer storms of noise to anxious, multiform expanses without sacrificing a whit of their questing, avant-garde intelligence.
