Neu!
Neu! 4

What happens to a band among the most innovative in the history of music after it has released 3 albums redefining the concept of music?
It turns out that there is nothing left to investigate. Nothing left to reinvent, indeed.
So, it happens that they release a fourth work like this Neu!4, which carries only the name of "Neu!".

A troubled, fragmented, and debatable work.

This too carries its own peculiar history: in fact, this Neu!4 gathers recordings from the mid-80s that, due to legal reasons, only saw the light in this form in 1996. Almost twenty years after the swan song of Neu!75.

Musically and otherwise, much water has passed under the bridge since then. Just think of the explosion and dissolution of the "punk" genre or the onset of the Disco-Music era or the rise of sampled sounds and the so-called Synth-Pop.

A completely different scene then to replicate a "Hallogallo" or "Hero". No, by then it would no longer make any sense. Something had to change, redirect towards other shores, towards other sounds. Just as Dinger with LA Dusseldorf and Rother as a solo did in the meantime, dedicating themselves to softer, more accessible sounds but no less fascinating, focusing especially on keyboards and synths.

Here we have the same line of thought, with valid tracks such as "Crazy" that slightly recalls the sounds of Neu!75 and "Good life", the outlandish "Fying Dutchman" and "Fly Dutch II" or the strange "86 commercial trash".
But it all sounds too dated, sometimes almost irritating (see "Danzing" or "La bomba"). It's all based on the search for catchy sounds, thanks (or rather fault) to the late 70s disco shift, which managed to ruin such an extremely valid and innovative project as Neu!.

Perhaps if this album had been listened to in its actual production date, namely in the distant 1986, it might have seemed less "dated", possibly, but when I listen to their first work made 15 years before this, paradoxically it still feels like listening to the future.

Therefore, I would advise lovers of the first 3 Neu! works not to rush to find this record (also because it's indeed very rare), but to console themselves with those they already own and ignore this Neu!4, just like VU fans ignore the post Cale\Reed works.

Even the best, unfortunately, sometimes lose the right path... or simply after having walked it all, they don't know what to do finding themselves already facing the future.