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Album Reviews
Album Review: Various Artists – Brand NEU! (Feraltone)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 11 May 2009
Neu! are a pretty important band by all accounts. They are one of those bands that in their own way served to make music weirder as they skewed it with their electronic excursions and Germanic wiles. Strangely enough, this has endeared them to Noel Gallagher and Bono. Which songs those guys were listening to, though, I’m not sure. Anyhow, more pertinently, many of those bands that actually can hurdle the prosaic stadium pub rock category have searched for unusual influences, and according to this CD’s premise those bands that feature here got said influence from Neu! First of all Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis joins Sonic Youth in a disjointed jam while SY’s Kim Gordon chats to the band’s lighting director about managing Dinosaur Jr. As much as I love Sonic Youth, this track was surely more a self-parodying in-joke by the band’s side project, Ciccone Youth, rather than some kind of landmark tribute to Neu! Ploughing on, there’s some dull Oasis, some weak Foals and ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’ by Primal Scream, which is rousing but led me to an unusual conclusion. While I always tend more towards guitar-based music, I actually find the electronic bands that use Neu! as a touchstone are much more rewarding. Cornelius’ ‘Wataridori’ reminds me of Neu! in the way Durutti Column did and it is the high point of the album, with flickering delayed guitar and squelching beats around unstructured tidal blobs of electronic stuff. Though LCD Soundsytem’s ‘Watch The Tapes’ is a close second best. It’s slick as fuck post-punk and has the weird alienating electric pulse of a Krautrock classic. Like being in the background of a low budget 1980s synthscape dystopian b-movie. Okay, this is a bit of a pointless album, but it’s fun at times. PG
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