Falco
Verdammt wir leben noch

THE REVIEW

February 1999.

A year had passed since Falco's departure. In those months, a steady, heavy rain fell incessantly. Some, simply and sorrowfully, soaked themselves in tears. For others, however, the precipitation was of a very different kind.

Indeed, a torrential cascade of money went to flood the coffers of the music industry, which saw its quick action rewarded as it rode the sudden and agitated FalcoMania that had erupted in 1998, with stores promptly inundated by lightning-fast reissues of the classic albums, a hugely successful best-of entitled "The Final Curtain," and the re-release of a couple of old compilations that had already come out in the middle of the decade.

EMI, on the other hand, benefited solely from the success of the questionable instant-release "Out of the Dark (Into the Light)," but then joined forces—with fellow giant BMG and the small GIG Records of Markus Spiegel, the very first label to sign Falco—to put together a second posthumous album, using almost all the material long stored in their labels' archives but never considered when the Austrian artist was alive.

The excellent initial idea was to entrust the artistic direction of the project to Thomas Rabitsch, leader of the band that accompanied Falco on tour and a friend of the Viennese pop star: a sort of "guarantee" to protect the already meager artistic legacy left by Hans.

The care and attention Rabitsch devoted to the project was also praiseworthy, considerate and loving in giving a new sonic guise—actually, always rather respectful of the original idea—to songs that had never been released, or had come out as part of works by other artists.

Among the unreleased tracks, one was chosen to give its name to the album, as well as to serve as the first single to anticipate the CD's release. "Verdammt wir Leben Noch" only received all this attention because of its questionable title, sadly apt given the circumstances. The song itself does not offer much in terms of quality, unlike, for example, the splendid ballad "Europa," which was also snubbed by EMI in the mid-’90s but is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the record.

The third track recorded during the same sessions is "Die Konigin von Eschnapur," which was also timidly put forward as a single for radio. A song with an intriguing text, though perhaps too "elevated" for the usual pop audience, which that year was blissfully busy dealing with Ricky Martin's Latin-fueled Vida Loca or the nagging teen reiterations of the first Britney Spears.

Another treasure chest broken open was the one containing songs discarded during the 1987 recording sessions for "Wiener Blut". As mentioned previously elsewhere, Falco's collaboration with the duo Mende/DeRouge resulted in a meager handful of tracks, a couple of which—left out of the album—were "taken custody of" by Rabitsch to be offered in "Verdammt...," only slightly retouched compared to the rough mixes of the time.

The playful and bouncy "Que pasa Hombre" and the intense "Poison" would then be released in their original form only several years later, on a third posthumous album.

The CD also includes two reworks—by the Bolland brothers—of "Genie und Partisan," a track that in 1992 slipped away from the tracklist of the "Nachtflug" album (probably due to a sound too distant from the rest of those songs) to be included in a project by Bolland Project, "Darwin the Evolution". Reissued practically identical with the subtitle "Fascinating Man," it was instead cloaked in ecstatic elegance and renamed "We live for the Night," gaining new vitality.

But if we talk about elegance, the first step of the podium is occupied with regal nonchalance by "Ecce Machina," a streak in the sky, marvelous wonder that stuns more with every listen. Recorded in 1995 and given to his drummer friend Thomas Lang for a solo project, this weeping with regret lights a path that was never explored.

It is a song that allows one to vividly imagine what Falco's artistic future could and should have been, once the unhealthy and destabilizing vertigo of the '80s had evaporated. A future that was there, within reach, clearly represented by a perfect song—perfect in an absolute sense but, above all, perfect for him and his slowly mutating voice.

"Ecce Machina" was an intoxicating seasonal fruit never picked, the potential start of a new phase that never took off, that of a conscious maturity—to be understood also as the mature awareness that—besides occasional divertissements such as the Techno T-MA project, conceived in the same period—it was precisely starting from these discursive flows and these exquisite sounds that the most suitable and credible new artistic path was to be sought and found, in those last years of the outgoing century.

There remains to mention the presence in the tracklist of yet another, predictably superfluous remix of "Der Kommissar," a serenely negligible alternative version of the title track, and what was effectively the last track recorded in the studio by Hans—emblematic title: "Krise"—another daring excursion by Falco into the realm of certain Central European Techno, with the problem of being well past its sell-by date. Almost a daughter—quite a rebellious one—of "Mutter...." which, years before, had instead managed to effectively latch onto the trend of the moment.

Turning a blind (Christian) eye to a female-voiced chorus that sounds as if it were thrown together thirty seconds before the recording session ended, in my opinion—although conditioned by an unshakable and perhaps by now inappropriate "Rave" predisposition that I have always had under my skin—it remains all the same a thoroughly enjoyable and very entertaining exercise, with lyrics perfectly in tune with the piston-like frenzy of the beat.

"Verdammt wir Leben Noch" was, predictably, released with great commercial expectations. It instead turned out to be, surprisingly, something of a flop, selling about a fifth compared to the previous "Out of The Dark," and making it clear that a large part of the public who came to Falco after his death, in the end, only did so on a fleeting wave, subsequently showing little to no interest in taking that further step out of the funerary hype, thereby giving up the opportunity to delve into an artistic proposal that spanned almost two decades.

No longer reprinted and only recently made available on major streaming platforms, it is nonetheless a work that should be rediscovered and valued, being, in terms of quality, light-years away from its questionable, if hugely popular, predecessor.