Faust
Faust IV

If kraut-rock was a very heterogeneous movement and difficult to define (except for the well-defined socio-cultural background, which is Germany in the early '70s), it can equally be said that the Faust from Wümme managed in just three years to embrace the genre's antipodes with a mastery that still amazes today.

After debuting with the self-titled "Faust" in 1971 (iconic is the large hand viewed in x-rays that graces the cover of the vinyl), the band gave birth to "So Far" and then "Faust IV" in the span of the next two years. While the debut consisted of three long suites steeped in absolute and frantic noise, even going so far as to cite, while maltreating them, two hits the size of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "All You Need Is Love," the second long-distance trial manifested as a transition work, marrying the more extreme tendencies that had voiced in the eponymous work with a melodic approach from skilled pop players (listen to the most fortunate of the lot, 'It's A Raining Day, Sunshine Girl').

An experimental project adrift, in full identity crisis? Anything but, ladies and gentlemen. What Faust managed to produce with their third long-playing effort is a record you would start over every time it ends, to catch new nuances with each listen. Faust IV is a milestone of the whole kraut currents, a thirty-six-year-old that still seems like a newborn, one of the absolute joys for my ears.

So brazen as to title precisely "Krautrock" the monumental opening suite of the record (and who would have thought these potato-eaters know self-irony?), Faust immediately give a sample of their omnipotence in the field of deconstruction. Twelve minutes on a shuttle that has the pace of a steam train, rhythmic and highly disturbing; an apparently harmless little march that the band enjoys polluting with every kind of gadget at its disposal. Tambourines, whistles, rustles, crashes, spatial distortions that strongly recall the masterpieces of contemporaries Hawkwind. Tun-Tun-Tun-Tun, the monotonous little motive that acts as a skeleton does not abandon the listener until the final minutes, when the instruments start to appear more and more distant, independent of each other. Slowly the mix becomes more ethereal, the steam train seems to have taken LSD; then it dissolves into nothing, leaving a sinister tumult in the auditory tubes of the patron.

Point and start again. You don't even have time to ask yourself what was that stuff before the silence is assaulted by a tormented clown's scream, followed by a loud nose blow (!). The reggae with maracas and xylophone (and the Violent Femmes of "Gone Daddy Gone" thank them) that arises from it is completely disorienting, leaving you flabbergasted. Suddenly you start shaking arms, legs, and head to the irresistible Caribbean rhythm, realizing that the story here has changed from right to wrong. After launching you into orbit, Faust brings you back to the ground to dance on the heads of Nazi pigs. "Going places, smashing faces / What else could we do?" 'The Sad Skinhead' is a pop music gem filled with sounds in full faustian style, impressive for its foresight, a piece that would probably still today be a potential summer hit, to see danced by kids.

For the second time the piece ends and you find yourself scratching your head, not understanding anything anymore and we're still at the beginning. The dull beats and distant melody that introduce "Jennifer" bring you into another world again, much more indecipherable. Jennifer, whoever she is, is a lucky girl, because it's not everyone who can lend their name to such a dreamy litany, steeped in a European flavor that makes it so familiar. But as you know, Faust have a reputation to maintain and at the 4-minute mark they start testing the moped by pedal kicking it. Almost out of the blue, we are dealing with cosmic vortices that die on themselves, which Roy Montgomery and Bardo Pond will not forget. Until a hit on the plate gives the cue for a piano tarantella à-la Residents, concluding the third track of a record that would already be enough packaged as it is to surprise you.

"Just A Second (Starts Like That!)" kicks off with a guitar borrowed from Black Sabbath raging over a motorik this time unmistakably of pure kraut pedigree. But once again the chameleons swallow everything they find along the way. Crickets, cicadas, even little birds. There's really everything on the menu; we stumbled into a summer evening with a synthetic flavor. And then helicopters, gunshots, machine guns, it seems like being in Vietnam. Faust make great music because they manage to evoke images that seem resurrected from the most intimate experiences but actually belong to an android world that sometimes seems to blur with ours, only to contort in its claustrophobic chaos.

A dance of the industrial era built on a monotonous bass and two drunk voices crossing ("Ease me baby feed me baby, naked lunch is fun / I'm so lazy, I'm so crazy in the rising sun") opens "Giggy Smile". This time, our folks launch into a groove that moves you from your chair, pausing after just a minute on ambient atmospheres, only to finally pick up the most danceable lines of the speech, once again built on the clean and monochrome bass of Jean-Hervé Peron. The track then morphs into a solo bounced between the guitar and a sick sax; finally changes pace in a blink and opens to an electronic dance where guitar, bass, and synthesizer chase each other, stumbling from time to time, aided by the masterful 'Zappi' Diermaier pounding on his drum now more schizophrenic than ever.

The ringtone melody drags on for a few more minutes and after various skids, it crashes into a pine. End of the ride, end of a hypnosis session. There are two voices talking to each other on the microphone now; we are clearly in a recording studio. And who knows what the hell they are saying to each other in German. "Läuft...Heisst das Es Läuft Oder Es Kommt Bald...Läuft". Then one of the two starts a bucolic acoustic guitar before a synth with a medieval flavor begins to take shape and transports the increasingly fortunate music-lover to a now terrestrial paradise, but very, very ancient. A sinister hand clapping, a nursery rhyme sung in French: it is a moment of total surrealism and also the peak of the increasingly articulated dream Faust serve us. You barely manage to tailor a melody before you’re served up a disorienting sound that reshuffles all the cards. This time it's a wooden pinwheel inserting itself into the context, and by now the game is clear: the music changes. Needless to say, one-two-three and the disturbed pastoral dies into nothing, and from the nothing emerges yet another ethereal synth, painting boundless horizons. It’s the lyricism of the machine era, and it’s beautiful.

"Läuft..." ends after 8 minutes, leaving you drenched in a strange sweetness, to pass the baton to the final track of the album, "It's A Bit Of Pain". The genius of Faust, manifested in an extreme variety of forms, reveals itself here from the choice to close a path that has shaken the unfortunate listener with what is, after all, the most traditional and/or conventional piece of the album, the only one worthy of being called a "song" without shame. It’s a slow and sweaty country ballad for acoustic guitar and piano, which the band this time limits itself to distressing a couple of times, with a frequency disturbance first and with a female voice in a radio tone later. Until a very, very distorted guitar comes to put an end to 'Faust IV', hand-holding the melody to the end of the concluding pastoral skit.

At this point, if your device is similar to my car stereo (and I hope not, because this masterpiece deserves much more), you start again from track number one and here a double chance opens to you: for the astonished listener, as I was at the time, not pressing any button represents the most profitable choice, because this authentic contemporary piece of art can catapult you every time into a trance in which the most disparate forms can be seen. For the listener hungry for Faust, and I was also, but only after a dozen consecutive listens, there is the second disc of the splendid edition released on CD by Virgin in 2006. Besides offering alternative versions of the cult pieces from the album, this gem contains the triad 'The Lurcher - Krautrock - Do So' recorded as BBC Sessions in 1973 (and released on the related record) and the splendid interlude of 'Piano Place'.

"Faust IV" is a work in its entirety very intricate, a knot that seems to never completely untie, but not for this complicated or difficult to listen to. It is able to amaze with its foresight, but it does so in a less cerebral and ostentatious way than many of its contemporaneous experimental works, Teutonic and not. It terribly blends into the common taste and never misses the opportunity to show itself light years away from it. It represents a starting block for entire generations of musicians to come and an absolute milestone for a kraut-band that today would deserve (at least) the respect attributed to the cousins Neu! and Can.

It’s a dog chasing its tail, a half-hearted confession. A record full of colors, and of poetry.