Neu!
Neu! 2

What is a beautiful record? When can an album openly be considered "beautiful"?

1) When all the instruments are in agreement with each other and overall, it is ear-pleasing.
2) When there are beautiful melodies and lyrics, with a touch of innovation.
3) When in just over half an hour of noise, frightening and damaged sounds, there lies the future of music.

For the first case, I recommend a great Astral Weeks from '68, an excellent vintage
For the second case, both Bowie's Low and London Calling are good options, just to mention two records from '79
For the third case, the choice becomes very limited and not for all tastes. Surely this second work of Neu! fits perfectly.

This German duo Rother-Dinger, who, as solo artists or with their respective bands, produce mostly captivating, sugary sounds without skimping on the use of the synth, but together their hidden dark side comes out, perfectly matching each other.

I believe the history of this album is now quite famous, but this review has to be made for everyone, especially for those who don't know, perhaps encouraging them towards knowledge.

After their first album (a masterpiece), Neu! found themselves without sufficient monetary base and with an album to make for their contract. 90% of humanity would probably have asked for a bank loan completing the album as it should be, perhaps even calling some surprise guest. 10% would probably have given up the project, accepting the consequences. They fit neither of these percentages. They are probably not human. In fact, they did much more. They played pre-recorded tracks at different speeds or ruined and manipulated the tapes until the result was unrecognizable (the various "Super", "Super 16", "Super 78" or "Neuschnee", "Neuschnee 78"). This is the first case of a remix in the history of music. This is the most difficult, dark, and obscene work in music. But above all, it is Art.

It starts with the long ride on the outskirts of cerebral synapses of "Fur Immer": it closely resembles the various "Negativland" or "Hallogallo" from the first record, only more introverted and tendentially sinister.
Then comes "Spitzenqualitat": with Dinger's drumming as usual rock-solid, on a noisy backdrop of electronic distortion, with a pace that goes from fast up until the ending where every beat seems to be played on our defenseless skull which will surely be regretting not choosing Astral Weeks...
But now you're deep inside it and it's not wise to give up right now.

And so you begin to accumulate a lot of anger within you from the tension released by every single track. But more than tension, it's malevolence. Pure malevolence, the truly evil kind.

And here comes its peak: "Lila Engel": or in other words, the devil in music. 4:37 in which you lose control of your body which at this point is in a state of panic not knowing how to channel this negative energy given in such massive doses. It's demonic. Dinger's percussion and the guitar gusts follow one another, overlap, and interact with each other simultaneously, reaching the end of the track almost gasping, almost unaware of what happened in the last 5 minutes.
The tension rises as in the perfect script of a horror film, reaching the mechanized "Cassetto" which seems to anticipate for years and years those heavy metal drumming rhythms. Truly unlistenable. Truly magnificent.

It's all over in just over half an hour.
Unlistenable and horrendous? Console yourselves, at least you haven't wasted much time listening to it.
And if music is a form of Art (and music is a form of Art), then the length of an album, its listenability, become secondary. With a painting, it is of little importance how much it resembles the reality of the object depicted, immense is the importance it has for posterity, its ability to rewrite the canons of "beauty" and "innovation".

In short, if Astral Weeks is Impressionism, this is Dadaism.

Yes, because in the end, the purpose of Neu! wasn't the ambition to create the music of the future. It was to play around with the tapes, with the effects, with the electronic gadgets and if then it led to creating something innovative, so be it. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they knew very well what they were heading towards. Maybe that name "NEU!" is not just a coincidence. The fact is that together Dinger and Rother created something unique, destined to remain for posterity.
And if one day, perhaps in the year 3000, a man of the future were to find this album buried, he would realize that most of what he considers classical music comes from there. And if that discovered record were also damaged, that man would probably see, in turn, the future of music in it, because great works of Art are like that: outside the concept of time, space, and beauty.