SCHLAGENHEIM

Here we see a group of young musicians who are extremely talented in their respective instruments, if you skip to any moment of the album in almost any part of it someone is playing in a fast, loud, and probably odd time signature, all in a good shape. Overall we can already perceive some of the identity the band is trying to create for themselves, they make some mix of math-rock and post-punk around a "noisy" atmosphere, these elements can work very well when put together with coherent songwriting because all these sub-genres originates from punk and are nice combinations.

My problem with this album is not the way the songs are played but the manner that they are written, which most of the time don't make me "feel" the music, let me explain.

The band fails in most of the songs to create something with a structure that makes sense as a unity. I am not saying that the album is bad, I consider it to be good, all the songs have their "segments" of geniality but some of them don't have a sense of direction or goal, this is a problem because I picked up myself impressed by the techniques of the members but don't feel emotionally involved in most of the album because of the lack of atmosphere creation.

There are some songs with cool concepts that don't fall into this trap, "bmbmbm" is a song with simple lyrics and almost no vocal technique, the trick is that as the singer "say" the lyrics (that are like something written by Frank Zappa) the instruments dance around him and the chaos of the track slowly increases until you are immersed in the mess of the last seconds. "953", the opener of the album is very good too, throwing you in the middle of the noise-punk and only letting you go out for a few seconds of breath until start the mayhem that lasts to a point that this same mayhem loses its strength and the beats become more sparse near the end.

The two songs above can easily make to a playlist, some of the others too depending on your music taste, but overall this record is nothing revolutionary. I recommend this for people who are into music with noisy experimentation but I must say that "Cavalcade", the second album of the band, is a much better work where all the problems of these are fixed, so you must start there then come here if you want more material of the band. 3 Stars.

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