Album of the week: Week 1, 2018
"immer wieder rauf und runter
einmal drauf und einmal drunter
immer wieder hin und her
kreuz und quer mal leicht mal schwer"
When Michael Rother (Neu!), Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (both Cluster) released their second album, Deluxe, in 1975 a couple of things were new in their sound. The band had added some singing to their reportoire. Not very much, but just enough to give the album a different vibe than their debut. The other new element was the adding of Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru on drums on several of the songs on the album. This gave the motorik rhythm patterns an element of looseness and a more jammy sound. Walky-Talky is the prime example of this. A slow beautiful jam that is in my ears a forerunner for bands and artists as diverse as David Bowie, Brian Eno, Joy Division, New Order, LCD Soundsystem and the whole Oslo-Space-Disco-sound made famous by Lindström & Prins Thomas and others.
Brian Eno said in interviews in the mid-seventies that Harmonia were "the greatest rock band in the world". It's hard to imagine Eno's ambient records without the inspiration of the whole german music scene in the mid-seventies. Eno and David Bowie even sounds a lot like Harmonia and other german bands like Neu! on the Bowie album Low, the first of his Berlin-trilogy.
Deluxe was recorded in the summer of 1975 at Harmonia's own studio in Forst, West Germany, where the band also lived. The album's engineer and co-producer was Conny Plank. The album is more immediate and song-oriented than the band's debut album. For me one of the best things about the album is that there is a lot of space in the sound. The instruments all got their place in the sound, and though there are a lot of more ambient sonic soundscapes there are always room for the different sounds to breathe. The band doesn't hurry anything, and the result is a somewhat mellow yet driving album.
The opening song Deluxe (Immer Wieder) has an anthemic quality to it and the main "riff" wouldn't have been out of place as a anthem for some sports championship or something. This song is also one of two with singing/chanting, and this for me works as a kind of theme for the album. Especially so as the singing returns as a reprise in the song Monza (Rauf und Runter) which opens side two of the album. Monza is by far the most rocking song on the album and here Neumeier's drums really drives the song forward, along with some really rocking bass guitar playing and fuzzy synths and guitars.
The album's closing triplet of songs, Notre Dame, Gollum and Kekse are the most ambient on the album. These songs, and the whole album really, sounds like they might as well could have been recorded yesterday or tomorrow by some hip, young cats. Nothing about this albums sounds dated or 1975. Still it was from an era were this kind of music never had been made before.
A classic.
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