Faust
Faust IV

Among the Kraut scene, Faust are certainly the darkest and most mysterious characters, always enveloped in that mysterious fog from which only music emerges, excellent music. Like all German bands, they had a short life or at least few works in a few years. Four albums, like their colleagues Neu!. If talking about the first album is really very difficult given the austerity hidden among the various brilliant insights of the three tracks of which it is composed, talking about Faust IV seems much simpler. Simpler because it very much resembles a real album. It has eight medium-length tracks (except for the first "Krautrock"), it has more refined sounds, it is less crazy. Space for heavy riffs and even pseudo-melancholic moments, without circus fanfares or Bavarian choirs.

Could this approach to the traditional rock form be due to Virgin who signed Faust? Perhaps.
But don't misunderstand me, this is a great and wonderful album, not at all flat and "commercial". If I discuss this before talking about it, it is only because just two years earlier Faust chilled the world with a punch in the belly with their first LP.

This is a more accessible work, which personally in some parts greatly reminds me of Velvet's White Light\White Heat.

It begins with the longest, noisiest, and most Faustian track of the whole block: "Krautrock" or almost twelve minutes of highly noisy improvisation that keeps intact the links with the first work. But there's already a surprise from the second track. "Sad Skinhead" with a killer riff that, listened to today, makes us realize where many insights of bands like Arctic Monkeys or Strokes come from. Truly a track of astonishing modernity. And then? And then there's "Jennifer", a slow, monotonous ballad that somewhat confounds the listener who, already by the third track, no longer knows what to expect from this album. But towards the end of the track, a noisy explosion reminds us that this isn't a mid-70s American band. The fourth is "Just A Second (Starts Like That)" which incredibly closely resembles Velvet Underground's "The Gift" in its claustrophobic guitar loop and also in the very confused and hard mixing of the instruments. But unlike their American cousins, after just two minutes, not only guitar noises but also electronic sounds, screams, and a piano appear, which immediately disappears almost as if it has mistaken the song. "Picnic On A Frozen River, Deuxieme" where voice and guitar duet in an almost playful and nonsensical atmosphere, then proceed to a Zappa-like excursion for trumpet and then die out in a monothematic progression of the same motif. It continues with "Giggy Smile" and "Lauft...Heist" very quiet with that typical air of the German band halfway between innovative cue and irony. The concluding "It's A Bit Of Paine" seems like a calm song almost à la Fripp, yet a noise on the phrase that acts as a refrain reminds us, yet again if we still confuse wool with silk, that this isn't that American guitar diarrhea. And it matters little if the dirty solo in the middle of the piece once again recalls Velvet Underground's White Light\White Heat ("I Heard Her Call My Name"), Kraut is a whole different story, it's made by crazy people who take you by the hand into desolate meadows and instead of making you observe the deserted plain on which you set foot, they invite you to raise your eyes to the sky, towards the cosmic, towards the indefinable, towards what all the other bands have only tried to imagine, they take you there. Asking for nothing in return, except your psychic satisfaction.

The fact is that this album ends here, the career of Faust (the notable part) ends here, and Faust IV is its worthy epitaph, and even if they will never be remembered and cited enough because overshadowed by much more resounding names than theirs, who cares: no one will ever know what really happened, except them, of course.