Neu!
Neu!

THE REVIEW

These are the words about Neu!'s debut, from the one who, ten years and more ago, rekindled interest in that wonderful tale which was the so-called Cosmic Music.

We are in the early '70s, when rock was progressive and riffs started to breed like rabbits when out of nowhere, from the cosmic void, a reddish marker drew three letters on a white background. And a certain Klaus Dinger and Micheal Rother were laughing, that laugh of those who knowingly look into the eyes of those who don't know what is about to happen, but will soon find out. And so they recorded music called Neu! together with Conny Plank. Thus the legend goes.
And "New" it was, because nothing is comparable to it, even today. "New!" exclaimed and underlined, as a sign of propaganda, of innovation, a cry of nonviolent revolution. All this was just the cover, the lettering, the eye-catcher of those who went to their record store in '71 and saw this object on the shelf and decided to take it, why not.

Unfortunately, I wasn't born in '71 and I wasn't even in the remotest of futures, so I couldn't tell you precisely the effect it had on the average rocker, the neophyte, or the musical sommelier, listening to this record. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you if I would have bought it or if I would have bought Bowie's new album instead. Coincidentally, this Neu! project drove the same Berlin Bowie crazy who wanted Rother by his side to suck his soul. Fortunately, he then refused, dedicating himself to a solo career and to Harmonia with Cluster, but that's another story and I don't think it's the case to digress so much since this album in itself would deserve pages and pages of digressions. So far, we have talked about everything around the album, now let's get to the heart of the matter: the eight tracks that mark it indelibly.

A few seconds of "Hallogallo" are enough to understand that maybe you were right to prefer this to Bowie. A space-time vortex seems to open before you, you see it and feel it, it's hypnotic in its infinite spinning (ah yes, from now on you can also call it Motorik) in its intricate groove, and inside you glimpse various things and nothing well defined: it should be Rock, but I see Funk, it should change, but instead it remains almost unchanged for nine minutes and forty-seven seconds, it should be present, at most past, but I see the future, a parallel future, one that never and then ever becomes present, let alone past. Like eternity. I believe it is the essence of the whole Kraut movement, one of the top five most revolutionary tracks of our time and our planet. Nothing at the time sounded like "Hallogallo" and I believe nothing more will sound like "Hallogallo" except "Hallogallo" itself, endlessly. But then you are too captivated to still have your control and it happens that you are sucked to the bottom of that vortex, down a long channel that never ends, while echoes reminiscent of airplane roars contrast with the initial mantra you had become accustomed to. Sometimes they are deafening and you wonder why. Why do these noises have to do with music, with melody, where is a riff, a verse, or a chorus? You start to understand very little and you're afraid when "Sonderangenbot" ends with a deafening noise. But it's not the end, it's the beginning of "Weissensee" where everything becomes a bit clearer, you start to see psychedelia, the really aggressive kind, very heavy. You start to outline some common traits in their music: that mechanical, very cyclical goings-on, which often leads to a progressive increase in noisiness\sonorous\emotional that leads to ever more excessive outbursts. So you feel strong, superior because you shaped that sonic matter that had so baffled you before, you mock the next track names, convinced you already know what to expect. And instead here's "Im Gluck" which opens with the sound of water hitting a small fishing boat. Water in Germany? In Dusseldorf then? Maybe it’s that pseudo-liquid layer that envelops your brain in your skull, cradles it, keeps it calm, invites it to relax and unwind, after all, what reason would there be to always be on the alert when you've assimilated this album as yours? None, precisely. The real point is that you’ve gone wrong in doing the math, labeling it, correlating it to something known.

Relaxed then, right? Here's where peace ends, a drill breaks in and shatters that calmness you held so dear: it's called "Negativland" and if that was the calm, this is the storm, spatial. The brain has been rudely awakened, it complains, creates lightning and tension with the skull surrounding it, while outside there's music, there's a repetitive bass and a guitar that tries to merge (black) moods and music. All under the control of Dinger, relatively calm, endowed with self-control even in extreme situations like this. It seems that the monotony and duration (nine minutes and forty-seven seconds also here) of "Hallogallo" has been superimposed on the sound splinters of Weissensee, with the relative spikes of nervousness. Only here it's different, it's more complicated. About halfway through, too much has already accumulated to remain still and here's that long-awaited outburst. But it seems too little compared to the meanness unleashed, definitely. And here it starts accumulating again from zero, your hands tremble, your ears begin to reach the red alert zone, the bass instead doesn't feel any emotion and then here's the outburst. It's as if your brain, in its psychic masturbating, expelled everything it had accumulated from the beginning of the album, from the start of the day. It's all out of logic, impossible to describe in words what happens, but afterward you feel satisfied, yes I can describe this feeling, satisfaction. By now you've lost all your energy and you read the back of the album and the tracklist: "Lieber Honig" is missing and you hope it's quiet because if it were otherwise, I don't know if you could handle it psychologically. And fortunately, and logically, Dinger-Rother decides to end the Trip with a slow and comfortable return home, with the sea as a backdrop like Im Gluk and a voice that seems to squeeze out words, as if uttered at the point of death. With silence that turns off the album and a face lived by the listener, of one who has seen many things in just forty-five minutes, no longer able to distinguish a during, but only a before and after. Before and after Neu!.