Einstürzende Neubauten Explode a World and Build it Back Again on ‘Rampen’
Nothing about Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Everything Will Be Fine” suggests anything could be fine. The track, from their new album, Rampen: APM (Alien Pop Music), begins with creaking, like the warning sounds of a structure about to break. It could be the “collapsing new buildings” of the band’s name. And when frontman Blixa Bargeld opens his mouth, it’s not words of reassurance, instead he’s rasping moistly in English and German about voids and nothingness. Every second feels unsettling.
Then in comes the funk, as Alexander Hacke plays some wah-wah inflected electric bass, like an alien transmission from Bernie Worrell on the P-Funk Mothership, and Bargeld starts singing, “Ev-ry-thing will be fine.” But his tone is hardly reassuring. The group’s N.U. Unruh kicks in with some nondescript “metal percussion,” Hacke adds some vibrator (or so the album credits say), Jochen Arbeit plays amplified kalimba, and lead pugilist Rudolph Moser bangs on everything except the kitchen sink: bass drum, hi-hat, marble plate, and even shopping cart. Such calamities are the status quo for the long-running, Berlin-based industrial group, which passed its 40th anniversary a few years back.
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In the decades since they got their start, whipping chains against sheet metal, Einstürzende Neubauten have dialed back most of the aggression. Where once they raged with Dadaist impotence against a divided Germany and a divided world in the Eighties, they now rage at nothingness itself — and you can’t get much more German than that. Except that the rage is more like a steely intensity on Rampen, which finds them dwelling largely in quieter textures that recall their 1993 album, Tabula Rasa, and 2000 album, Silence Is Sexy. That said, they’ve been lurking mostly in the shadows, musically, for the past two decades.
They created Rampen by taking some of the music they recorded during encore jams on the 2022 tour in support of their last album, Alles in Allem — they call those improvisations “rampen,” or “ramps” in English — but largely the music here is more compelling than that album. Perhaps the improvisational nature of the music inspired more tension. (Incidentally, the all-yellow cover with just a type treatment is intended as a piss-take on the daring experiments of the Beatles’ “White Album,” but that’s only their second greatest Fab Four parody after “Headcleaner.”)
Neubauten’s improvisations surface in several ways on Rampen, often with mirror versions of some of the same ideas. “Es Könnte Sein” hangs on a fluttering folk guitar motif (and “amplified metal sticks”) and they repeat that acoustic guitar line, or at least approximate it, slowing it down and transposing it into an ominous minor key on “Trilobiten.” And then there’s the Patti Duke cousins, “The Pit of Language” and “Tar & Feathers,” both built around otherworldly humming — the same pitch on both songs, but with amplified kalimba that recalls gamelan music on the former and Eno-esque ambience on the latter.
Many of Bargeld’s lyrics describe journeys with unattainable goals. On “Ist Ist” (that’s German for “is is”), he narrates visits to Niagara Falls and “both great walls” and how what he’s looking for isn’t there, all over shuddering bass guitar and “amplified metal spring.” And on “Besser Isses” (“Better Like That”), he sings, maybe to Jesus, about how he’s tired of carrying someone’s legacy for 2,000 years. “I without you, you without me,” he sings (auf Deutsch), “That is all,” and Neubauten drives the message home with machine-like bass and scraping sounds.
Some songs seem to be between words. On “The Pit of Language,” he sings about falling into said pit, and it’s frustrating because he doesn’t really say much more than that, and he repeats his prolix nothingness on “Tar & Feathers,” but maybe that and the humming are the point. (Or maybe the real point of “Tar & Feathers” is that Moser “plays” “large ammunition shells,” not that it sounds explosive at all.)
On “Aus den Zeiten” finds Bargeld vocalizing, “Sing for me in yellow” (in German), but it’s the falsetto aaahs in the background that provide the song’s mystery and tension. And on “Ick Wees Nich (Noch Nich)” (a sorta slangy approximation of, “I dunno, not yet”) he sings of vagaries: “Sometime it’ll be time, then it’ll be there, but not yet” — and this is as chaos rattles around him, like someone jiggling the cutlery drawer and hammering. Or maybe it’s just the approximation of hammering.
Einstürzende Neubauten have always been expert conceptualists — true artists who create works meant to be interpreted and felt more than to be intellectualized. By giving themselves over even more to their concepts on Rampen — and no, everything will not be fine — they’ve created a new set of structures to explode.
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