NEU! '75

Sliding between effortless proto-ambient pseudo-electronica, minimalistic fingerspitzengefühl, brutalistic DIY and a cleansing, raw simplicity, Neu! '75 is a modernistic little cabinet of curiosities. It serves as a perfect bridge between the mid-to-late seventies' (often ambidextrous) juggling of clarity, simplicity and downright don't-give-a-damn and a fair bit of artsy, textural and often long-winded sonic experimentalism. Clean, tidy and seemingly restrained. The actual movement and development is all occurring outside where your normal focus lies. Just as it happens in life in general.

Bringing up the tired old Motorik sound is almost a bit of a cliché at this point, but you can't help avoiding it. Rather simple and repetitive rhythms hang heavily all over this album, deceptively anchoring the sound in a flat and effortless soundscape of wide open spaces and riveting, endless clarity. It's a cunningly clinical and intrinsically modernistic form of expression, that at first hides its full delicacies and warmth for the casual and fleeting listener. Give it just a tiny amount of well-deserved attention and time and layer upon layer of primitive sensuality and grace will materialize before your very...ears.

Space. Oh yes. Space more than anything defines an album such as Neu! '75. Breezy, airy and full of delicately silken touches, the impressionistic sounds slowly weave themselves into a tapestry of almost naturalistic beauty, when slow and restrained piano lines slide into sampled sounds of lazy and hazy summer afternoons and the ever restless (and occasionally threatening) seaside. There is an almost otherworldly quality to some of the compositions. Gleaming, shimmering, fleeting, rising and falling keyboard sounds that never try to fully flourish into melodic maturity, but rather hover and warble over a gradually shape-shifting sand dune of music. Slow, simple and gradual. Measured, clear and earnest. And inevitable, I guess. Guitars and bass stand out as melodic, but equally rhythmic focal points of an unclear and decidedly linear, but slowly evolving and gradually integrating set of sounds, perhaps with a hazy and wordless vocal line wearily tagging along for the ride.

Hero stands out as a more immediate bridge between the slight, but much loved, odour of over-ripeness of much of progressive rock and the sluggish, revivalist tendencies of primeval punk aggression and directness. It incorporates a slimmer, leaner form of the aforementioned qualities in an up-tempo exposé of ringing and hard-hitting lines of more in-your-face and reactionary musical ideas. Brawling with themselves, the vocals run around the music aggressively, challenging the music to join them for the ride in a raw, unfiltered world of urges and "baser" expression. I love it. After Eight joins the snarl, marrying that same steadfastness with a hissing, bubbling and unsettling form of rock reincarnation that I find very hard to resist. Post-rock, but in a completely different way than how it's envisioned today.

Loving this is not immediate. I grappled with the often proclaimed charms of Neu! for quite a while before I found the way into the heart of the music. Beautifully antagonistic ideas of near-industrial simplicity and effectiveness clashing with smoothly evocative and melodious romanticism. Couple that with an urgent release of brutal energy and, apparently, you've hooked at least one other listener.

Don't avoid this!

4 stars.

//LinusW