Neu!

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    Klaus Dinger (drums) and Michael Rother (guitar) were two guys who split off from Kraftwerk in 1971 (when they were an avant-garde percussion-based band that had no point in existing) due to a real lack of ideas on Kraftwerk's part.  They decided to do something new (if you were in Germany you'd say they were doing something neu!) and create a similar but meaningful type of music.  They came up with the idea of "motorik" - basically a combination of "motor" and "musik", and is precisely what you'd think it is...a steady, driving beat (the motor) accompanying whatever else the music was.  This resulted in long jams where minute one was almost the same as minute eight, and while that seems like it would be boring, it actually sounds amazing.  See, Dinger's got a robot foot, allowing him to keep a perfect beat, and not quite a normal one either (he keeps time on the bass drum, not a hi-hat).  It's music that forces you to...well, not really dance, but it's nearly impossible to listen to this stuff and not tap your foot to the beat.  Rother's certainly no guitar virtuoso, but he can still jam with the best of them, giving the listener something to really listen to on top of the beat.  Of course, the band did use synthesizers sometimes, a couple pianos, and a lot of weeeird ambient effects...Neu! was a band that really did think outside the box, which led to them receiving a lot of respect among other musicians.  Not exactly the most popular guys on the block (hell, even among krautrock they're pretty obscure, being that they basically played out like a stripped down version of Can), but they sure were influential (although not quite as much as their peers Kraftwerk) - David Bowie loved these guys, and the whole post-rock scene that's going on today owes a LOT to this band.  Particularly Tortoise, and of course, Stereolab, who are practically Neu! 2 (ha, ha!  a joke).  Lots of other bands, like Radiohead, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth have definitely been influenced, and this kind of respect has led to a lot of musicians namedropping them lately.  Neu! is one of those bands you can never give a rest - their music is certainly addicting, but it's also great as thinking music, and particularly driving music.

    They didn't really have a whole lot of downfalls, either - no apparent weaknesses stood out.  The most obvious complaint would be that they are monotonous - many of their songs have the exact same beat and generally don't change key.  But soon, you'll realize that this is actually the main strength of the band...variety is cool and all that, but it's still not as though a band who does the same thing over and over is necessarily bad (Ramones, anyone?).  Besides, when you take into account that they created this type of music, it becomes excusable.  It's not as though they got to flood the market...they released a total of only three albums when they were together, plus a fourth from a reunion attempt that was never supposed to be released.  Still, it's understandable if you can't stand listening to what are, essentially, variations on the same idea over and over again.  Their real weakness could be seen as an inability to put together an album during normal circumstances...although maybe it's best that they didn't, because it really gave them the chance to show off their talent.  Their first album was written and recorded in a very small time, and turned out to be a revolution in music making.  They ran out of money on their second album and as a result started another revolution.  And finally, after being apart for a year, they came back with huge creative differences and turned out their best album yet.  This was a very talented group, and it's a shame that they were only together for about three years.  Previously these albums were only available to people who were really good at hunting down vinyl copies or to those who bought the bootlegs, which sold mostly to those who was heard a lot about these guys.  Astralwerks recently re-issued them, so it looks like now they're finally getting their due.  (Also, from now on I'm dropping the exclamation point, it makes the sentences look stupid)

Neu! (1972)

Best Song: Hallo Gallo or Negativland

    Neu's debut album is something that is "akin to having a thousand orgasms at once" according to Thom Yorke of Radiohead and therefore Pitchfork Media and Spin magazine.  Maybe a bit exaggerated, as it maxes out at three for the easily excited at around 8:05 of "Negativland", but then again, if Radiohead's fame wasn't based off of exaggeration on the part of others, then where would they be?  Certainly not on the sticker of Neu's debut.  Truth be told, this album is important for a lot of reasons - not only for pioneering the 'motorik' beat that would later be copied by a bunch of albums ("Hallo Gallo"), but also for having one of the first industrial songs ever on it ("Negativland"), including ambient soundscapes way before Brian Eno made them popular ("Sonderangebot", "Im Gluck"), not to mention using whatever the hell that famous melody is on the first song of Dark Side of the Moon over a year before its release ("Weissensee"), and, of course, starting the idea of needlessly fucking up an otherwise good song ("Lieber Honig") which is currently being done by Daft Punk about 13 times a year.  This alone gives the album a good rating regardless of the fact that there's really only three (or four, if you count "Lieber Honig", and really you shouldn't) musical ideas on the whole record.

    But they're good ideas!  "Hallo Gallo" is the prototype for everything Neu, the song that likely got everyone into the band from the start.  To record this track, they basically went ahead in time 25 years and started listening to post-rock (Neu invented time travel, which is why this album was written and recorded in ONLY FOUR DAYS).  It starts with a simple bass line fading in, then Dinger starts his mechanized and programmed rhythm of *THUMP THUMP THUMP TAP*  (Do Until Time=10:05, as a BASIC program written in the 70's might say).  It's a great piece, with Rother stealing the show, laying down groove after groove of the funk guitar! (not really)  But still...remember what I said about this being driving music?  It's true, if Brian Eno ever released "Music for Driving", it would just be a bunch of Neu songs, because this music would be perfect for it!  Even more perfect than "Autobahn", which is what that song was designed for!  Because "Hallo Gallo" is the sound of things moving...of taking a trip, and not just getting somewhere, but having fun along the way!  "Autobahn" is designed for a friendly, but unrealistic trip on the highway...they aren't always peaceful and harmonious like the Kraftwerk song was - Neu's music simply simulated motion and a sense of wonder.  There!  Now that I've gotten that out of the way, there's also "Weissensee", which ends the first side (which is why it doesn't make much sense as track 3 of 6 on my CD) - very spacey and calm, being based off a couple of guitar chords and not much else.  Hey, this guys were minimalists, making the most of not a lot!  Less is more!  However, my pick of the rack is "Negativland", a song so good that the band "Negativland" decided to change their name to "Negativland"!  It's not like the rest of Neu's works - it's actually very grating on purpose, beginning with a pneumatic drill and crowd noises (?) before finally finding a funkish groove.  There's Dinger's beat, a bass, and a guitar playing metallic high-pitched sounds (at least I think it's a guitar, it sounds a lot like one...) (Update: 6/1/05 - it's actually an electric banjo, how the hell was I supposed to figure that one out?).  But the interesting thing is the song itself...it slows down, speeds up, and drops instruments at random, culminating at around 8 minutes when the guitar rises, rises, rises, and the song breaks out into its fastest yet!  For driving on fast roads in heavy traffic, this song is ideal!  It captures the frantic mood perfectly.  I especially like the way it ends...there's really no way to end a song like this, so it just stops out of nowhere, right in the middle of a measure!

    Other than that, the rest of the album is mostly forgettable, which is why I won't try to describe it much.  Suffice it to say that "Sonderangebot" is also very metallic sounding, like a trip through a factory (but with no beat)...sort of an ambient piece, but the loud parts always catch me by surprise (as does the fact that there's a dropout at 1:12, which the bootleggers were kind enough to remove, and then Neu insisted they put it back in for the re-release!).  "Im Gluck" is much more pretty, featuring water noises (not quite like a river, it sounds more like you're submerged in the water as it flows over you into some container) and fake guitar bird calls, but nothing in the way of an actual melody.  Oh, and there's "Lieber Hoenig" which actually isn't forgettable at all - certainly the low point in Neu's career, but it's their own fault!  It's a nice guitar ambient piece, except Dinger ruins it with his high-pitched non-singing which destroys the track almost completely.  He's not even singing actual words...I took four years of German and "baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooooohhh" is no word!  He's not even singing actual notes!  The most interesting part is in the end, where you can hear the water effect again, but underneath that you can hear Dinger and Rother talking, and what do you know, Dinger actually talks like that!  Can you imagine trying to hold a conversation with the guy?

    Well, whatever he sounds like, the album is probably more notable for it's influence than its actual songs, but believe me, this is still a great album even when you consider that only half the tracks really deserve the praise (although there are a lot of people who really like "Im Gluck".  Great grooves, rockin' melodies, and hey, even the ambient pieces are pretty!  The truth is that so many bands and musical styles were influenced by this, it would be silly not to have this in your collection.  Did you know that these guys invented trance?  What, did you think it just invented itself?  Well Paul Oakenfold certainly didn't invent it on his cleverly named Tranceport (and if you want long speeches on Dungeons & Dragons, look no further)!  Okay, maybe I give these guys too much credit, but it would be a safe bet to say that the idea for trance did stem from this kind of music in the first place.

Neu! 2 (1973)

Best Song: Neuschnee

    Sort of a bizarre case surrounding this album, as apparently dismal sales of the first album had forced them to record this album on a limited budget.  They only got through one side before they ran out of money altogether, leaving them with no studio time and a blank half of a record. For the second side, they decided to take a single released after the first album, which the record company didn't like anyway, because krautrock isn't really supposed to have singles.  Dinger got the idea to put both songs from the single on the second side, and to fill the remaining time he messed around with the songs until he had a whole side of music.  Probably not an idea that he came up with right away as a solution, as the first side contains some strange effects too.  The first song, "Fur Immer" is another "Hallo Gallo"-type piece, this time based off a more or less standard guitar riff instead. It opens with a 20 second fade in where the speed fluctuates up and down like the record is warped!  Probably scared a lot of people who listened to it for the first time, thinking their record player was broken.  The second track "Spitzenqualitat" takes the same motorik beat from the first song and slows it down at a steady pace until it gets boring, and "Gedenkminute" is supposed to be an ambient piece but is just boring instead.  Finally, they pick up their instruments again for the angry "Lila Engel" which features Dinger on vocals!  Not again!  But he does a decent job this time, actually singing (still no words yet) notes in a recognizable fashion!

    Side two is where things start to get weird.  First off, the two actual songs (strangely placed in the middle and end of the side) are both great!  "Neuschnee" is another perfect driving song...there's triumphant soaring guitar, and of course Dinger going patatatatappptt until the 45 is up.  "Super" is a more punkish affair, this time with Rother on vocals, a man who can actually sing!  Well, maybe not, because all he does is yell, but if Neu were ever to have a single, "Super" would probably be it.  The rest of the side is just those two songs played in different ways...you can hear needles dropping, getting bumped, then being ripped off in the two "78" versions of the single, which speeds up the tracks to 78 RPM ("Super" is actually kind of funny, as it sounds in the end like there's chipmunks riding the record player) (wouldn't it be cool to actually have this on record?  I have the first album, but this one's tough to get).  There's also "Super 16", which actually made it onto a soundtrack (of the 4th movie by Quentin Tarentino, Kill Bill, the 4th movie by Quentin Tarentino) - slowed down, the tune is menacing, with the drums and cymbals eerily echoing as the bass gets all distorted and ruins the rhythm.  There's some less-than-stellar attempts as well, like "Cassetto" which is entertaining enough, seeing Dinger feed the "Super" cassette into a tape player with dead batteries...it's distorted to hell, drops out at random times, and finally slows down and dies.  "Hallo Excentrico" is "Neuschnee" on reeeeally warped vinyl (or someone's got their hand on the record player) with lots of echo effects added (plus you can hear Rother talking about something)...once in a while I'll find the song to be pretty neat, listening to the warped beats over a downright strange background, but usually it's annoying.  But hey, what else could they do?  Honestly, I can't imagine what people thought of this in 1973...it must have been kind of like when games like Metal Gear Solid or Eternal Darkness came out that did things that games weren't supposed to do, like make you plug the controller into a different slot, turn your volume down, or turn off the TV.  This was certainly something different in the early 70's, which led some to pronounce it the best krautrock album ever (although those people are few and far between).  It also introduced the concept of the 'remix' which really didn't exist back then - hell, it had only been five years since Frank Zappa sped up his voice and started playing vocals backwards, so I wonder how the public reacted.  Still a pretty good album, although a much harder listen than even the debut could be.

Neu! '75

Best Song: After Eight is my favorite, but it could be any of them

    (Update 6/1/05: Mitch Hedberg really is dead, so ignore what I had written here before.)  I'll catch a lot of flak from krautrock fans by claiming this as the best thing the band ever did, but I don't care!  Even though there are people who clutch their copies of the debut album and say, "Look at this garbage!  It's accessible!  It's not very innovative in comparison!  How can it be the best?".  To which I'll say something like, "who cares if it's not innovative"!  After all, the previous two albums were innovative enough that they had enough ideas to use.  For this one however, they actually had time to make the album and money to record it!  It's just that Dinger and Rother weren't getting along too well!  Not that it even mattered...instead of compromising on something that neither of them liked, they decided to just do their own thing on their own side of the record and the result is, to quote Napoleon Bonaparte, "flippin".  It's like two mini-albums at once, not quite like Abbey Road but more like what Three of a Perfect Pair might sound like if Fripp still knew how to write songs after 1974.

    Side one is Dinger's side, being the more ambient and peaceful one.  The opening track "Isi" is already a new classic, not only incorporating everything good about their other good songs, but adding piano and synthesizers!  Now we see where the final piece of the Stereolab equation fits in.  It's driving and forceful, just also very pretty and adventurous sounding.  And the synthesizer and piano hooks are great!  The next two songs are more calm, based off a slow moving metronome that keeps the time.  "Seeland" is a great ambient guitar piece, whereas "Leb Wohl" is another piano driven one, with Dinger actually singing actual words!  In fact, his vocals are actually good!  I'd take the first three tracks as a conceptual whole - I just realized that "Isi" is like sailing to sea, "Seeland" is when the shore disappears and you're cruising to your own personal island, and "Leb Wohl" is getting there and just chilling and haven't a good time with your favorite female friend!  Did you know that a lot of Neu's song were about a Swedish girl that Dinger once knew named Anita?  Who he said was the love of his life but her father wouldn't allow them to see each other?  Guess it would explain some of the goofy song titles like "Lieber Hoenig" and "Lila Engel" (if you knew German you would agree!).

    Side two is where Rother lays down the rock.  In fact, he almost goes punk before there was a punk!  This side is based mostly off of Rother's guitar..."Hero" and "After Eight" are similar pieces, with cool guitar riffage, a loud motorik beat, and Rother screaming about something (you can even make out the lyrics if you try).  In fact, if you like Bowie's song "Heroes" you'd probably like this one too!  Not that they're similar, but Bowie has mentioned taking a lot from this band, even naming one of his albums after a Neu song! (Hint: It's "Heroes".)  Then there's "E-Musik"...just when you thought this album has got it all, comes a long motorik piece to rival "Hallo Gallo" and "Fur Immer"!  I didn't like it as much at first, but that didn't last long...check out the piano banging and the Trans-Europe Express-like drum effects two years before that album even came out!  Put this all together and you get an amazingly solid album that deserves to be owned be everybody.  It's hard to pick out the best songs, as all of them are great...my "High Points" list at has had every song on it at one point, but it's just so hard to choose favorites on this album.  Maybe not innovative after the last two albums (although the ending of "E-Musik" has a slowed down "Leb Wohl" and a backwards "Seeland" on the end to give the album some conceptual continuity which is cool), but this is where they get it all together.  Ironically enough, they were arguing over creative differences apparently all throughout the sessions.

Neu! 4 (1985-1986, released 1996)

Best Song: Crazy

    So apparently after working in such hit groups as La Dusseldorf and Harmonia, Dinger and Rother finally decide that they should work together again, writing a few new songs that weren't going to be released at the time.  Apparently Rother wasn't happy with the sessions and didn't want this to get out but it came out anyway.  The reason why is pretty clear...although admittedly this could be a very decent 30-minute album, instead they decided to release the entire sessions, which includes the same song pretty much done over and over again.  Dinger and Rother did come up with a very nice four note theme that they proceed to drive into the ground on every possible opportunity, making for one of the most redundant albums in the catalog.  Guess it kind of works as a modern way of doing those classical albums that were variations on the same themes, but this one is just the four basic notes!  It's still a good hook, and the difference between the guitar driven Neu! '75-style "Crazy" (actually one of my favorite Neu tracks, if you can believe that) which features Rother screaming at the top of his lungs and the pretty "Schoene Welle" is astonishing.  I guess "Good Life" is pretty cool too, but it's just a second-rate "Crazy", and I'm not even counting all that "Flying Dutchman" stuff.

    So I guess I'd be better off talking about what ISN'T based off that theme because there aren't a whole lot of them.  The beginning and ending tracks are just versions of the German national anthem, with the ending one played backwards (and neither really add anything), but there are still three more tracks that at least show the band doing something different.  Sometimes it doesn't work, like the weird advertisement collage "86 Commercial Trash", but their other ideas are hits.  They've become interested in dance music enough that they'd name a track "Daenzing", which is an addictive-as-hell New Wave tune that dabbles a little in what is this, Latin music?   That influence in particular shows itself off in the bouncy synth-driven version of "La Bomba" (not sure if the spelling mistake was intentional) which doesn't borrow much from the original, so I have no problem calling this the second best track on the album.  It's a very upbeat tune with more of a disco-type beat, incorporating a lot of weird vocals in the background.  And they even invented the fake-skipping technique (honestly, it's not surprising) that would make people think their CD was scratched!  It's a shame this didn't make it to disc back when that would have been really cool (when CD players were first being introduced), but what are you going to do?  There's also the worldbeat/folk instrumental "Bush Drum" which may be the strangest track on the album (considering what you'd expect from this band).

    I guess fans of this band will want to track this down, but really it's a shame that they didn't put more effort into it.  They certainly showed that they weren't really out of ideas (even though nine of the tracks are variations of the same theme, they do cover a lot of different styles and incorporate a lot of effects into those tracks that leads me to believe that they may be out of hooks, but not ideas), and given a degree of agreement within the group, could have actually made a great comeback in the mid-80's.