Alexander Hacke
Sanctuary

THE REVIEW

Alexander Hacke: a laid-back guy with a big mustache, incredibly friendly, who has been playing since the early days with the godfathers of industrial music, Einsturzende Neubauten.
But I remember when I saw him live for the first time: tank top over a prominent belly, profuse sweat, incredibly hairy, and constantly headbanging as if he were playing for Slayer or some other loud band.
Alexander Hacke, the Hell's Angel of Neubauten, a guy to whom I asked for a cigarette and who tried to drag me into a hotel room (oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said that... but he's gay!), still, a really friendly guy with whom you can have a chat, miles away from the diva or existentialist attitude of so many post-this and post-that types... who then have nothing more "post" than the post where they park their Duna when they go to work.

Alex has made a CD that... well, let's see... convinces only halfway, in its wandering between somewhat empty and self-serving noise-making, ambient tracks ("Sonntag"), ephemeral hard rock ("Sanctuary") with the voice of former Jesus Lizard David Yow, which turns it all into a wild honey to pour over chest hair while watching Celentano's show.
Yes, the connections with squalor and madness are plenty here: at times, it seems like you're watching the immortal Bruno S. playing the organ in "Ballad of Stroszeck" while playing the keys with one hand and giving the finger to the kids who came to listen to him with the other.
Alex Hacke is somewhat the Monty Python element, the one who mixes the unmixable and makes it digestible for you... then with witty nonchalance hands you the alka-seltzer and tells you "yes, sorry but you should get out of the way because Bayern Munich is playing soon"... and what do you do, stay? So then he drags you into "Fear and Loathing in Hackeland", makes you hear the vibraphone that doesn't vibrate and the Theremin, which I still haven’t figured out what the hell a Theremin is but it sounds cool to mention it, so... Theremin!
Then Hacke serves you Gianna Nannini, yes, she's among the guests too, surprised? And she sings you a "Forever Butterfly" (a dreadful title, even the Gazosa wouldn't!) that gives you chills... I swear, chills! A splendid song with a rhythmic structure of ventricular fibrillation, that is, a certain death.
But I don’t want to die, at least not for now, so I continue, a new Biberkopf, in this Berlin Babel (cool reference, huh?) and I get lost in it... how beautiful the cranes, the fences are; but where is Postdamer Platz? I can’t find Postdamer Platz anymore... but it awaits you, airy and impossible in its non-existence in "Bush/Throat" which seems stringed together from the Rede-Speech of his friend Blixa Bargeld (could he be gay too?). Quite a few minutes of vocal solipsism, zen meditations, and several joints later we return to see the stars with the metaphorically-disturbing sauce of "All American Happy Hour": here start the dances at the center of the Tropicana, the mulattas' armpits are licked while Hacke winks at you and sways his hips, a new Village People, groping the drummer’s perineum, But he’s sitting! You might say... well, he can do it because his name is Hacke and he is a founding member of Neubauten.

An heterogeneous album and not always at a high level, sometimes dispersive but very imaginative.
The pigeon no longer exists.