Review: Rammstein Burn Bright on Triumphant First New Album in 10 Years


KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES - From their 1995 debut Herzeleid to 2009's Liebe ist für alle da, the undisputed champions of Neue Deutsche Härte ("New German Hardness") have never wavered in their sound and vision. Like some of kind of kinky, pyromaniacal, Euro industrial-metal version of AC/DC, Rammstein have stuck to their guns over a decades-long career and made consistently rock-solid, if sometimes formulaic, music that sounds like no one else. Churning, mechanized riffage. Militant, Teutonic beats. Alternately epic and hectic synth lines.

KONTAK PERKASA FUTURES - Quiet verses; bombastic, often single-word choruses. Lyrics, sung in Native tongue and guttural voice, about sex, perverted or otherwise. Lyrics about how fucked up religion is. Lyrics about German cannibals. Lyrics about how much Amerika sucks. The occasional ballad. The occasional, usually regrettable, song with English lyrics. You know a Rammstein tune almost as soon as it kicks in — and certainly as soon as Till Lindemann kicks in. Which is both a good and bad thing, depending on whether you like Rammstein or think they're laugh-out-loud absurd.

It's been 10 years since the band's last album of all new material, Liebe ist für alle da (Rammstein have offered up two live records, a greatest hits compilation, a career-spanning box set and an LP full of classical reworking of their songs in the interim), but if anyone thought the group might noticeably shake things up over the course of that decade, think again.

For a band as notoriously volatile when it comes to their internal dynamic — that volatility is a big reason why it's been 10 years between albums — Rammstein are steely and steady when it comes to their output and presentation, a machine as well-oiled as the band members' pecs on the cover of Herzeleid. Lead single "Deutschland" and second single "Radio" open the sextet's new, untitled album, both crisp and razor-sharp, wrangling with the complicated history and legacy of the band's homeland with incisive concision. Both sound more Rammstein than Rammstein, the group's formula refined but largely untweaked over the past 10 years.

Source : revolvermag.com