This week I discovered a number of new Americana and country artists, and I am looking forward to hunting down their albums with wild abandon. I’d tell you all about them, but let’s wait for that moment to occur randomly, shall we?
Instead, how about some German industrial metal? If you don’t like both Americana and metal I can only assume you spend a fair bit of time scrolling absently past vast chunks of my blog. Outrageous.
Disc 1633 is…Zeit
Artist: Rammstein
Year of Release: 2022
What’s up with the Cover? I don’t usually sleuth anything out about a cover beyond my own idle observations, but looking at this weird looking building I confess my curiosity got the better of me.
Turns out this is a building called the Trudelturm in Berlin. It was built in the mid-thirties as an aeronautics research facility. Equally fascinating, this photo was taken by Canadian musician Bryan Adams.
In his youth Bryan Adams was the lead singer of Sweeney Todd after Nick Gilder left the band. The same Nick Gilder that was the subject of the review immediately preceding this one!
I have zero Bryan Adams records in my collection and only those two Nick Gilder albums just reviewed. The chances that they’d be connected by a photograph on a metal album cover are very low. Yet here we are. Synchronicity!
How I Came To Know It: I have had a growing appreciation for Rammstein in recent years, fueled in large part by my friend Chris, who has bought me their last two records as gifts. That includes this one – thanks, Chris!
How It Stacks Up: I have three Rammstein albums and I like them all, but I must reluctantly put “Zeit” in at #3.
Rating: 4 stars
Rammstein’s latest record sees the veteran industrial metalheads taking a slower and deliberate approach to their sound that leaves you with the feeling that things of Dread Import are being broached, though perhaps not resolved.
Of course, I had no idea if this was happening while I was listening. Rammstein are a German band and naturally enough, sing in German. As an English speaker you get spoiled by foreign language bands indulging you with translated lyrics but with seven straight #1 records in Germany and throughout Europe, Rammstein doesn’t have to indulge any Anglocentric bullshittery.
With Rammstein’s earlier work you can expect to be bombarded with furious pace, but on Zeit it is a slow but deep churn. They only launch into a full boil on two or three songs, but that churn is like a powerful and dangerous current. You can see it swirling across the top of the river, ready to pull you under if you venture too close.
It took a couple of listens for me to do so, as I spent my first exposure wanting Rammstein to get on with it and give me the furious aggression I am used to. However, over time the album’s dark beauty revealed itself to me and by the end I liked it just the way it was; a slowly rising stair that only rarely comes out into the open air. In many ways the Trudelturm is a fitting cover photo. That building was designed to harbour heavy currents of air but keep them all inside a thick concrete building. Emotionally, that’s how “Zeit” feels.
Because I love lyrics not knowing what these songs were about drove me nuts and shortly before writing this I succumbed to the urge and looked them up. I was not disappointed. There is an incredible range of topics. These include an anti-Nazi song (“Armee der Tristen”), a song about a domineering abusive mother (“Meine Tranen”), and one on plastic surgery (“Zick Zack”). These harsh topics sit alongside tunes that are a lot less serious, like “OK” (no condom) and “Dicke Titten” (big boobs).
Longtime Rammstein fans will have to be OK (meaning comfortable here, not condomless) with the slower pace, but the album is very much the equal of the more furious sound that has come before. If anything, the starker approach allows the vocals of Till Lindemann to come even more to the fore, and – if you speak German – to delve into his deliciously dark mind all the more fully.
Best tracks: Schwarz, OK, Meine Tranen, Angst, Dicke Titten, Adieu
