They're so silly and serious.
Albums: Satanische Verse; Egodram and Antichrist
Das Ich are blessed with a great visual identity -Stephan, the numerically adorned pale gentleman in the middle, looks really weird. His bone structure, rubber face and lithe frame makes him look like a genuine demonic imp and, when in full crimson body-paint, is a real sight to behold. A band of personal lore who always used to show up on my Amazon recommends but I could never find any...basically, some top notch ebm-industrial clanking going on, great Operatic level orchestral samples and Stephan's barking, growled vocals -not Skinny Puppy gurgles, oh no -Stephan Ackermann has a strained, bloodied voice that's shrill, painful and oozing with charm when it needs to be. Perhaps best compared to a Blixa Bargeld if he'd smoked less.
The three albums haven't sunk in yet: they all contain high quality industrial programming from Bruno Kramm that's only fault is that it may be let down the CD mastering, and exhaustingly verbose German lyrics from Stephan -he's a real wordsmith, I think, as his words spills out with rhythm, feeling and are delivered with a good deal of emotion. My limited understanding of German puts them firmly in the creepy-black-metal-theatrical-Neubauten-existential business category.
Worth checking out at some point because their albums are usually quite cheap, I suspect they were deeply in vogue at some point and then a generation of part-time hip-goths turned their collections over to Second-hand places as I found their entire discography in a box for 7 EURO apiece and was only stopped from getting the lot because I'd already splurged about 150EURO that day on CDs.
Gulp.
No comments:
Post a Comment