Der Blutharsch
When All Else Fails!

"When All Else Fails!" partially closes a cycle, and partially opens another. Also known as: the typical case of a failed transition. A transitional phase, this album from 2002, where the battleship Der Blutharsch lightens the artillery, maintains the appearance of a tank, but replaces grenades with water balloons filled with piss.

As often happens in transitional works, not all the doughnuts come out with a hole, and good ideas are mixed with not entirely successful ones. But after all, how can we not grant the baker Albin Julius, with a prominent role in the grey area and a handful of undeniably successful albums behind him, a pinch of desire for renewal, a certain willingness to open up to new sounds?

The leaden post-industrial visions that characterized the past thus become contaminated with quirky solutions that will characterize the more successful successor "Time is Thee Enemy!": the album of the definitive turning point that will lead the entity Der Blutharsch towards more canonically neo-folk shores.

But if in the past we appreciated the strict rigor underlying the pachyderm movements of rusty industrial from the iron curtain, in "When All Else Fails!" we suffer from the grafting of new elements not perfectly coagulated (and coagulable) with the still typical sound of the Blutharsch (the major upheavals will remain the preserve of the next album, while it's reasonable to consider this work as the not-so-brilliant epilogue of a phase that reached its disintegration).

The music of the Blutharsch continues to move between gloomy ambient and the peculiar World War II post-industrial hallmark of the project. The difference is that the battle is fought (for the first time) in the company of a parade of characters, some well-known (Lina Baby Doll from Deutch Napalm, Joeffroy D. from Dernière Volonté), others less so (Marthinna, J. Weber, Maya G.Mc. S), all more or less destined to become regular presences in future albums. All, more or less, called to render Julius's music confused and limping, which in the end he handled better on his own (if you want something done right, do it yourself...).

The vocals, for example, here are off-key, there become a real torture for our ears, producing overall the opposite effect of what was probably the original intent: to give greater solemnity to the monolithic march of the Viennese panzer. That Julius is not a singer was known, and the idea of massively increasing the sung portions does not emerge as a particularly successful choice (with all due respect to the vocalist Marthynna, who is certainly not Callas, and who only rarely manages to recover some points for the overall work).

Additionally, there is the strong emergence of a more properly folk component (not neo-folk, we specify) that probably constitutes a regurgitation from the more remote past of Julius's career (assuming anyone can remember the not-so-memorable The Moon Lay Hidden beneath the Clouds, the first incarnation of the Blutharsch).

Detuned little guitars flow among the grooves of an electronics more muddled than usual, other acoustic instruments (including Julius's inevitable 1930s violin) and hand percussions clash poorly in the usual sound bombardment of sampled voices and air raid sirens.

An understandable search for humanity, yet not always carried forward with the right conviction. The good thing is that the album gains fluidity, the tracks diversify, good ideas are not lacking, and overall the music of the Blutharsch begins to be tinged with a certain irony mixed with boldness, a mix that will characterize the evolution of the project; an irony (as always, irony) that is appreciable, but inevitably takes away something from the atmosphere and evocative power of Julius's music, no longer, from this moment, a salvo of rockets up the ass and a path paved with hemorrhoid lumps. An irony not devoid of arrogance, a full manifestation of his belief, therefore, where there is no longer even a need to appear hard and pure, as if what needed to be proven has already been proven, and now one can move towards a lightness that only certainties and an unassailable status confer.

Just take track number 12 (as usual, the tracks are untitled): a bizarre little march that could also be an Adriano Celentano song (perhaps, but it vaguely reminds me of "Azzurro"), an inconceivable stylistic choice if you think about the tension arising from the sorrowful and well-considered notes of an album like "The Track of the Hunted".

Who might like such a turn? Probably no one (as evidenced by the decreasing value of the albums following "Time is Thee Enemy!", increasingly heading towards a dull goth-rock). And so the old-time fans will turn their noses up, while those who have always thought that the music of the Blutharsch is crap will find only a valid confirmation of their theory.

Good crap to everyone!