Neu!
Neu! 75

1975. In the mid-70s, real music was already dead, or at least in the ICU before the final scream of Punk. It was a somewhat strange period, like a transitional phase, too late for those psychedelias that just a few years earlier were as abundant as rabbits, and too soon for that anger and nihilistic Punk spirit. A middle period in which many bands tried to make their voices heard.
Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, after their respective breaks with Harmonia and La Dusseldorf, decided to follow up their Neu!2. This time the funds were indeed available, but surprisingly the album name was not Neu!3.
This, in fact, seems like a true artistic essay, one of class, like a partnership of roommates who keep their distance. In fact, especially after experiences with other bands, there were too many divergences that had developed between the two. What more democratic decision than dividing the six tracks, three for each. And if it wasn't exactly like this, listening to it, this is exactly the impression one gets. As if the first part were more of a memory, with a melancholic almost goodbye side, reminiscent of the music between Ambient and more concrete Space Rock, with touches of piano and synth. And Rother gifts us with dreamy atmospheres; while the second part is hard, incredibly hard. It's Punk. It's Punk in the music, in the attitude, in everything. It's Punk two years before Punk. And Dinger is Rotten two years before Rotten.

First Part. (Isi - Seeland - Leb Wohl)

Four piano strokes introduce us to this third chapter of Neu!, we are a bit stunned given the previous work, but barely have time to look around and the piano steps into the background to Dinger's motorik, more engaging than ever, while echoes of synth contribute to creating that wonderful atmosphere, somewhat novel for the German duo. It's "Isi". Here one notices the influence their solo projects had on them. It continues with the meditative and reflective progression typical of Rother. It's "Seeland" and it's a relaxing cure for our senses assaulted by the two previous works: an ever-constant pace growing and then cyclically vanishing, without many changes in the various progressions. Typically Neu!. And then suddenly, at the end of the track, a shower of rain heralds the next piece. The sea opens "Leb Wohl" infinite like an ocean in its imperceptible sounds between the waves, like a perfect blend of music and environment, with a shy ticking in the background, almost as if it doesn't want to ruin the atmosphere. A dreamy, sad atmosphere that relaxes and invites to ease the senses and let oneself be cradled. A locus amenus where one can take refuge after a bad day. Occasionally, words burst in, single words not sentences, followed by that typical echo of open spaces, well described by Eno. It's a nine-minute mantra, increasingly abstract, increasingly magnificent, it's a farewell with tears in the eyes that the sea carefully welcomes when they make their way to our face. And with this farewell ends the first part of the album, the most reflective and intimate one, in a crescendo of intensity and emotion, but also of the lengths of the tracks and for simplicity.

There's not even time to put down the handkerchief wet from the emotion of Leb Wohl, when "Hero" bursts in, aggressive, Punk. A rich and sophisticated Punk, not crude. Dinger screams, no longer whispers. I believe Rotten listened to this piece many times over two years, while Bowie limited himself to make it plural, also two years later. The song seems never-ending, increasingly degenerate and shouted, but then everything dissolves from where it came. And we move on to the next track. "E-Musik" a fast rhythm from Dinger with the typical Neu! fades, seems already a somewhat classier version of the aggressive previous piece. There's an indefatigable rhythm and a monotonous theme (in a good way) that repeats until breakdown. Then here too something seems to go wrong and two minutes from the end the rhythm stops, leaving space first for silence and then for what I believe are Seeland tapes manipulated. And then out of nowhere, from the same nowhere where Hero emerged, now comes its sibling, "After Eight". The discourse doesn't change, nor does the rhythm, it almost seems like a reprise of "Hero" more distorted or something. The distortion increases, the anger reaches its outburst, and Neu! at their last true album.

Analyzing the record as a whole we can only give it one adjective: classic.

Because this album is too fragmented compared to the first, and too between-the-lines compared to the second, but it is equally a masterpiece, the swan song of Neu! who with this closed the trilogy that gave a new life to Rock. Actually no, to Music. That same music that in the mid-70s had lost its way, here finds it again passing first through the Paradise of the first three tracks and then the Hell of the next three, without passing through Purgatory. Because Purgatory is a middle road, for common men who do not have the authority to choose what to do with their lives, for better or for worse. And Rother and Dinger certainly didn't need a Purgatory, unless there was a drum set, a guitar, and the sound of the sea as a background.