Grauzone
Grauzone

The most extraordinary English post-punk song of the eighties is... Swiss. The band was called Grauzone and the song “Eisbear” or “Iceberg.” The band came from the cold, just like the song, and they were instantly sainted by the "little black ones" of the '80s. In fact, "Eisbear" is a truly fantastic track. It has an icy and mysterious atmosphere, built on a carpet of martial synthesizers and the “heavy” rhythm of a drum machine that makes no concessions. Words declaimed in German that never meant a darn thing, not even to the Germans. And then the schizophrenic moans of an out-of-tune sax over a faint guitar line. "Futuristic disco music," some would say, the track that D.A.F. never managed to write, others would claim. Boh, the fact is that “Eisbear” is an extraordinary evergreen; it was so in the '80s on a dance floor in Berlin as in a jukebox in Roseto degli Abruzzi. It still is now in the seventy-first extended remix by Molella's nephew or on the soundtrack of a South Korean reality show. Simply and, let's admit it, perhaps a bit randomly, a masterpiece.

Around that song, the Grauzone of the Eicher brothers then built a very brief career, consisting of a debut album and a handful of singles that have been collected in the recent double anthology that I am reviewing here. Then they broke up, just as the polar ice is melting, and they disappeared into the same icy fog from which they had come. There was never a comeback. There are tales of their legendary tour in 1981, about a dozen improbable concerts in the ballrooms of Grisons, what a flash... They often turned their backs on the audience playing in almost darkness, and they got spit and bottles thrown at their backs like rain. The recordings that remain, attached to the deluxe version of the reissue, prove their extreme technical ineptitude but have a virulent and persistent charge, stuff that today you can't even find in baby gangs. Like some of their contemporaries, they loved provocative and indecipherable symbolism, and they were "totally into it." Actually, they enjoyed creating a sense of very punk ambiguity in graphics, lyrics, and statements of intent. In short, they had a passive-aggressive image and never spoke willingly to the press, but this is a story already seen elsewhere. Oh, importantly, they split at the peak of their success (!?), even before performing outside their homeland. Definitely all "very 1981."

Thus, Grauzone remained prisoners of their own time, trapped in that mythical post-punk/new wave era that the years have inflated like a legend. To make things even more crystallized in the past, Grauzone did not succumb to the recent reunion craze that swept many of their peers. Would you believe that one of the Eicher brothers, Martin, still lives like a hermit in a mountain retreat, in true Salinger style?

The songs on the double vinyl titled after them, originally a single, recently reissued by the programmatic “We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want records,” brilliantly convey the atmosphere of that contentious, alienated and paranoid time. The tormented and romantic thought forms that singer Martin Eicher offers in his lyrics are absolutely in line with much of the Swiss punk scene, which was very active and feverish at the time. Musically, they are indebted to the great “synthesized” bands of neighboring Germany, D.A.F. above all, but also Palais Schambaurg and Abwarts. Even if far from the legendary debut single, many interesting episodes can pleasantly be revisited in this 2021 reissue. The furious punk charge of their concerts is somewhat dampened in the studio version, with the band revealing themselves to be lucid, inspired, and capable. The rhythms are almost always cold and hypnotic, but flashes of melody light up. As in the beautiful instrumental opener "Film 2," or the spectral “Kälte Kriecht,” the sweet and melancholic “Hinter den Bergen,” and the lively and energetic "Wutendes Glas.” Traits of very DIY experimentalism and echoes of kraut rock do not smother a creative vein that remains brilliant even after 40 years. In a cocktail of jagged post-punk guitar lines, psychic synthesizers, and lyrics spat out in classic “Neu Welle” style, the album perfectly withstands the greenhouse effect of our era. No one can know if these "high-altitude" experimentalisms could have evolved Grauzone into something subsequently more accomplished or if the band would have ended up singing at Eurovision after Albano and Romina. The fact is that the inevitable sense of “Young Werther” melancholy of their brief epic and the sense of fragile incompleteness of their artistic parabola are all that remains, along with these “calippic” songs, preserved and preservable excellently even outside the freezer. Absolutely recommended.