My Review: L’appel Du Vide - Metro

L’appel Du Vide - Metro

Look! Saxony, one of the federated states of Germany, presents us with four of its emissaries of beauty from the astonishing Chemnitz, famous for its statue portraying Karl Marx, but for Old Scribe above all for the numerous bands that have made it a secret cradle of countless splendours.

Four years of activity have shown that the pelvic and mental treatise of this combo is a radioactive stain of surgical propensity, an epidermal shock that goes beyond the musical genres on offer, between an almost Deathrock, a confident Post-Punk and a sublime Noise Rock mixed with candelabra to illuminate the torpor and suffering of the city that has never managed to invade the world, but which next year will see as European Capital of Culture.

This work is a process of combustion, thoroughbred horses thrown into a gallop to leap over obstacles filled with banality and vulgarity: the Germans here employ rational and emotional strategies, a pick, a spade, a chisel and a lathe, to make listeners aware of what it is to be a reject of society.

A continuous uproar, in the celestial watershed of confusions made palpable, with dutiful precision, taking care of the sound, its outrageous and swaggering rules, to slaughter consciences more than eardrums, for a crazy world tour, encompassing the United States (the overflowing Portland above all), as well as the strong Manchester in England, to arrive at the intuition of the qualification of melodies as witches resurrected after a long hibernation, to bestow fatuous fires and handfuls of incense inside our nostrils.

Something primitive, the fruit of pre-medieval charcoal conquests seize the bloodstream of these compositions, to materialise in the modern proscenium of insult, in the wandering dance behind its scenes. 

It becomes clear that their ambassadorship has the will to progress, to leave its core and become an affront, a clash, through songs that wander the sky like murky clouds in a successful attempt to make the sun's rays weep: when iron flies in the sky, no heaven feels safe.

In the eyes of the four metalworkers, the history of man is a cemetery to be carried in the fragrance of their faces, a puzzle of Machiavellian ardour, the arrogance that reigns and conquers, deconstructs and amplifies the pain starting from punk and ending up stuck inside movements full of spasms and fireworks, in the chaos of an irrepressible adrenalin.

It drools in terrifying mode, tangles in a spasm that hurts the head, with continuous stings, relegating pleasure to the dead theatre of illusion. Songs like gratings full of blood, microscopic attacks that with the passing minutes become a nuclear roar against a peace that they just don't care about: once again the Old Scribe turns his cheek to this mysterious and rebellious group, offering himself as a sacrificial victim, conscious and happy.

The rhythm, often murderous in its corrosive speed, carries itself along with bass lines, blades of shattering guitars, the vulgar and extraordinary drumming, seductive altar of every physical pick.

When the piano and synthesizers dare to show their breaths, we give in to an unexpected heart attack: like druids without respect they play with our senses, spewing forth courses of extraordinary and at the same time alienating beauty, where commotion genuflects.

Suse, Friday, Flatty and Rene: these are the names of these furious little guns who composed a treatise on madness that the Frankfurt School, with its extraordinary philosophers, would have rewarded with a degree in applied alienation, with an academic kiss.

Enough is enough, it is undeniable that we have to reckon with the individual cracks and move into a getsemane waiting to be breathed, amidst more weeping olive trees than ever before...

Song by Song

1 - Nacht

The opening is a heart attack, Sheffield seems resurrected, and then it's a tangle that starts with The Killing Joke as it glides into Frisco, and loses its free will to be the gymnasium where everything has to be precise, with monumental and rapid changes of rhythm, and a vocal that is dry, symptomatic and abrasive.

2 - Verschwiegen

Primordial seeds of arthritis-filled vapours coming from Fields Of The Nephilim become apparent in the first few seconds. Then it's savagery, barbaric and atomic disembowelment, backed by magmatic guitars and Rene showing us the breath of Rozz Williams. 

3 - Offenbarungseid

Wounded Post-Punk, following Bauhaus as they put makeup on their faces, takes off to attack our already clearly wounded bodies. Everything becomes a locomotive full of mental refugees, enraged, embracing the unforgiving guitar: it rips, sews, paints vessels dripping with sweat and sticky jelly. The breath is short, but a stratospheric black joy is experienced....

4 - Woanders

Here is the alien Germany, blameless, majestic, elusive, that makes us wait, with the play of guitars and drums, to become stake and heartbreak. The time oscillates between 1977 and 1980, the places are the vertebrae of London and Detroit, in a Post-Punk party of incredible placebo effect

5 - Verbrennen

The Banshees open the dances, then it is the majestic corpse of the band, its uniqueness, that emerges: a song that is a procession, an armistice, a surrender that knows darkness when the singing begins and the drumming becomes sombre. Then just debris and fans falling to the ground...

6 - Fleisch

The head bows, the eyes search for treatises on ancient medicine, the notes fall from the sky like slow, dust-filled skeletons, in a slow industrial spectrum that turns into a hard-core murder of inhuman chorality, to arrive, following a treatise on imposed education, to play with Deathrock missiles and then, again and again, flow into hard-core. Devastating!

7 - Warteschleife

No truce, for pity's sake, you don't, you mustn't, and the four of them beat up, they don't give a damn about common sense, and continue to sow bullets, in the chaotic Dantesque circle, placing zombies in the sounds and malignant smiles in the harmonic textures...

8 - Ausgeliefert

Berlin calls, Hamburg cries, Bremen swings, Frankfurt waits: a song that, like a super condensed book, struggles to contain the sparkle of these black seeds like gloating worms. It yearns, it waits, it enriches, it warms the skin of sound in a dance that makes a mop of every thought...

9 - Fragezeichen

The delirium, with the first part of the song reiterating a neurotic and shadowy methodology, the surprise of a stratospheric finale, with that piano that kills every caress, makes the leave-taking a new epidermic shock, with the story of the first and blasphemous Post-Punk that emerged from the banks of the Mississippi, then able to penetrate into the heart of the German black forest. A delirium that sums up everything we have heard and makes this album a spectral mirror of clamorous urges and macabre, powerful beauties...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

28th March 2024

Album out on 29th March 2024

https://sabotagerecords.bandcamp.com/album/lappel-du-vide-metro-lp