My Review: Phileas Fogg - ALLESMUSSSEINENDEFINDEN

 

Phileas Fogg - ALLESMUSSSEINENDEFINDEN

A dust of life is thrown into a microscopic pill, for a crumbling of matter that encroaches on the unhealthy flows of our questioning. And, when music depicts and represents this situation, an unpleasant dismay grips us, imposes duties on us and narrates the tension of a ravenous life in decay.

All this is the latest work of this Stuttgart band that has once again grown, imploded and exploded in its extraordinary maniacality in being a gritty atom that tells the story and fixation on the exercise of meticulous discipline. Everything is calculated and clear (they are Germans, let's not forget, they are used to doing things very well), and listening to these ten shocks leads to a neurotic walk inside ourselves, in places now uninhabited by consciousness. The three, moreover, swaying through the frothy burrs of an ancient Post-Punk but with modern storytelling, manage to become an uncomfortable mirror, where everything becomes a sad splinter, wisely destroying the fake security that the experience of inoffensive music provides. They don't, they hit hard, with delightful propensity to make these compositions brambles among the ruins of toxins that can only want to escape into these watts that, together with minimal musical trajectories, define, sow, becoming a footprint on which to line up our thoughts, totally exhausted and full of defeat and death.

Andreas's lyrics are a brief but intense zone marking: nothing escapes his gaze and his pen (machine-gun with bullets full of mephistophelian ardour) matches his singing, a black swan in a dark afternoon on urban and suburban territories, where love, social life, secret facts, dreams and illusions are glue on which to fall without the possibility of release. Pauses, impetuses, refined sketches within a time in which the fear of a faltering Germany (Kometengift) is also sketched, ending in a refined tale in which nostalgia and hope are deliberately left out.

With his guitar and his two companions (Fabian also on guitar and Nicholas on bass) everything is aimed at specification, at a controlled volume in heretical density. The knowledge of the structural treaties of Post-Punk here finds a chance to reject squandering, digressions and imitations: the trio retains the guides, the teachings of historical and relevant bands, but does not lose sight of the duty to be relentless and serious.

The electronic and synth inserts are inevitable stings, to transport the magnetic and robotic lines of the two instruments into a car park where ideas develop to enter the cellars of possibilities, where darkness counts more than light: there are uncomfortable truths to hide and protect…

The drum machine, in this context, appears in its magnificence, allowing further imaginative possibilities and hooks especially with synthwave and coldwave.

A dense, paralysing work (in the neuralgic zone of a time in which this musical genre is losing its value and capacity), which turns out to be an unexpected gift, an unhoped-for benefit, a swarm of mighty buzzing that was much needed, creating turmoil, craters and a splendid resignation, the one magnificently defined in the last words of this incredible album: ‘We leave everything behind’, for a nothing to preserve and perhaps very little to build...

Song by Song

1 - Salz

A shot of salt on the wound of a relationship opens this sublime work: it is a hyperbolic shot, a vocal geometry that condenses and gives the guitars and synths a whirlwind on which to take flight. Rapid, compact, crumbling, the track is the antechamber to an inner hell that escapes the gaze.

2 - Vorbei

The end of life as a duty: here music and words become a sad Gatha, which helps to keep awareness alive. We go back in time, to that vessel that embarked vital water giving the joy of defeat... A set of chaotic vibrations given by the guitar and a synth that reminds us of the stylistic importance of Killing Joke. We end up with a farewell that Andreas sings with immense strength and sadness...

3 - Augen

A love that is observed, contemplated, an invitation and a bonfire await the protagonists of this diamond that gnaws at your breath with its pacing, the guitars that are a siege and the bass that induces the breath to die. Fierce and enchanting, the song reveals the zones attached to an artistic mode that at this moment only the three of them know how to show with a straight face...

4 - Regen

The track narrates a behavioural strategy that incorporates the present and the afterlife. With this premise there is a palpable tension, a drama that the refrain knows how to exalt, delivering the negative apotheosis of our existences. The singing, together with electronic inserts that atrophy the limbs, dives into the din of an ascent that delivers obedient thunderbolts.

5 - Hafen

Seemingly calming waters, the bass draws a line that grants space to an effective and almost joyful melody, but then... Then sadness surrounds the musical structure and we feel a cage coming out of the notes and fitting properly into our brain, allowing, however, the illusion of a dreamy atmosphere...

6 - Kometengift

A majestic peak, a merciless look at Germany's current affairs delivers an unprecedented musical jewel: it is impetuousness, a flying mill spilling kilometres of dirty water over the future of a nation accustomed to command and fertility. After a sombre beginning, given by a seemingly hidden chant, an avalanche of notes curls up amidst blood and voices that almost scream, making the whole thing a faint breath under a carpet, in which history seems to end its glory…

7 - Meinerfundenesland

The love told here lives of waiting, of short dreams, of continuous descents, and the sound carpet is dense with dark roads, inevitable cuts, and heavenly electronic sparks, with an opening in a major key revealing an inevitable but resoundingly pleasant melancholy...

8 - Belegt

A window, personal, to visit the psyche. A corridor, musical, where the history of the Neue Deutsche Welle emerges, where punk, post-punk and waves of electronics refine the space of a story that runs fast, to sublimate this view in a devastating procession of closed eyes and exhausted lights...

9 - Küssen

Sun, voyage, moon, shadow, kisses: in this tsunami lives a bittersweet musical toxin that seems to generate expectations of explosions... A song that seems to be the recitation of Bertolt Brecht's painful poems delivers an unexpected theatricality, compacted by hypnotic synths and scorching guitars, all under the banner of a comet that crosses life and space to die in perfect restlessness...

10 - Häutung

It is necessary to put life, lived and told, behind us. To do so, the band decides to close this work with a piece of suggestive and embarrassing power, beauty and truth frozen and dismissed, as absorption, consumption and detritus. The umpteenth jewel in a series of electric cables that create light to remove energy, completing a magnificent work. And it is with a tearful dance that a wonderfully sad and devastating experience ends...

Album of the year 2025 as far as post-punk is concerned, without any doubt!

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th April 2025

https://phileasfogg.bandcamp.com/album/allesmussseinendefinden