| Pitchfork. |
 The original Strategies Against Architecture collection, released in 1984, collected some of Einstürzende Neubauten's earliest recordings. The material's still a little shocking 26 years later, if only because there's very little else that sounds like it. Pounding on scrap metal and playing with power tools, the early Neubauten made a feral and highly rhythmic brand of punk noise. A large number of Neubauten imitators sprang up in the 1980s, banging away on oil drums and shopping carts, but none of the copycats played with the intensity of the originators. Its some of the only music out there that sounds like it was actually painful to make.
The band captured on Strategies Against Architecture, Vol. 4, which collects material from 2002 to 2010, is obviously not the same band, even if it shares many of the same members. Neubauten were able to wring a surprising amount of drama and invention from their original, abrasive toolkit, but even still, by the mid 80s they'd taken that harsh, stark clanging about as far as it could go. If the original SAA had a frighteningly single-minded sound, SAA4 is all over the map, a good one-stop introduction to the varied ways the band's tried to move beyond its scorched-earth beginnings over the past 20 years.
Neubauten once made a virtue of destruction; their name translates to "Collapsing New Buildings," a phrase which captures the girder-snapping intensity of those early records very well. Neubauten almost had to lighten up a little, both physically and artistically, to survive three decades. So while Neubauten's still more likely to make music by taking jackhammers to the Brill Building, they're no longer opposed to concepts like melody, quiet, and nuance. Some of SAA4's most affecting moments-- the buzzing, transfixing drone on "Insomnia"; the mix of gamelan-style percussion and music-box IDM on "Jeder Satz mit ihr Hallt Nach" and "Weil Weil Weil (Freie Radikale in der Warteschleife)"-- are its most restrained....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Complementing the original Strategies collection, this double-disc affair covers the years 1984 to 1990, featuring the noted Bargeld/Unruh/Einheit/Chung/Hacke lineup of the group. With an informative, witty booklet providing a slew of pictures and complete liner notes for each track, Architecture II focuses on the band's continued rude creative health through the rest of the decade, inventing and perfecting a wide variety of approaches that would help define industrial music. Power tools and heavy machinery still get used and abused throughout, Bargeld's vocals remain in extremis screeching or nervy, unsettlingly calm semi-crooning, both loud and soft tracks appear with regularity. It's abrasive and strangely beautiful at its best, art music via studio manipulation turned into gripping aural entertainment. As with the first Strategies, studio recordings get mixed with various live efforts as well -- in one instance, a fiery rip through "Haus der Luege" is grafted with the audience reaction from a completely separate concert once the quintet lit the stage on fire! Many highlights appear -- besides the aforementioned "Haus der Luege," there are a number of versions of the fierce "Abfackeln!," a blistering concert take on "Yu-Gung," the centuries-old death shuffle of "Ein Stuhl in der Hoelle." Two interesting diversions capture the sly humor of the group -- first, there's the 1985 studio take on the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra song "Sand," partial evidence of Bargeld's dual alliance with Nick Cave via the Bad Seeds, perhaps. The liner notes claim that the group "detected a Neubaten feel" in the original -- but if the idea means use of studio sonics, why not? Meanwhile, one of the variants of "Abfackeln!" is a 1988 Jordache jeans ad, of all things -- brief, but amusing, with the store's name bleeped out at the end because they refused to pay up!...full text |
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| Cloudspeakers |
| The original Strategies Against Architecture collection, released in 1984, collected some of Einstürzende Neubauten's earliest recordings. The material's still a little shocking 26 years later, if only because there's very little else that sounds like it. Pounding on scrap metal and playing with power tools, the early Neubauten made a feral and highly rhythmic brand of punk noise. A large numbe...full text |
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