Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions (Domino)
3/5
By: Chris O'Toole
One is a post-techno dance duo from Germany, mining influences as diverse as Krautrock pioneers Neu!, Kraftwerk and Cluster through to contemporary jungle and dub. The other is a Northern poet laureate, who has been spewing twisted, blurred lyrics with his band, The Fall, for as long as anybody can remember (himself included). And in what seems like a match made in some drug addled heaven, Mouse on Mars, aka. Andi Toma and Jan St Werner, and Mark E. Smith have come together in an unholy alliance to create Von Sudenfed. For some this new group are a family band, others see a freakish cult and for the rest they represent an international sound collective. Whatever they are, on their debut album, 'Tromatic Reflexxions', the group meld grinding, complex electro rhymes with the leering vocals of the eccentric front man to create fraught, ragged dance anthems.
Opener 'Fledermaus Can't Get It', sets the tone for the first half of the record. Jagged, splintered bombast oozes from the speakers before the semi-incapacitated and a semi-indecipherable Smith stumbles onto the stage to begin his free-associating visionary wordplay. In a similar style the following track, 'The Rhinohead', bears an unashamed resemblance to The Fall's own 'Blindness', from their 'Fall Heads Roll' album, but with bass and drums replaced with unforgiving electro beats. Once you tune into Mark E. Smiths drunken/Northern/slurred drawl, a quiet genius is revealed, a macabre poet for the disenfranchised. As he spurts out seemingly random stream of conscience thoughts patterns emerge and it is almost possible to crack his code. 'Flooded' has a definitive narrative, ostensibly based on a dream had by Werner, in which a club night is hijacked by an interloping DJ and Von Sudenfed are forced to flood the club in an act of carnivalesque anarchist sabotage. Again the lyrics are accompanied by disfigured electronic wailing, scribbling and screaming.
The sheer force of the music smothers Smith during the first half of the album however, and it is not until the latter half that album he begins to come to the fore. On 'Chicken Yiamas' he virtually sings, naturally in the form of an ode to a chicken, whereas on the following 'That Sound Wiped', the beats are again subdued with Smith swaggering up to the mic. Only now does it become apparent that Smith is one third of this group. With The Fall it is always Smith in the limelight, albeit with top quality hired guns to support him, but it is his band and the others would be noting without him. Here, however, Smith is a minor character early on, his lyrical observations lost amongst a sea of crashing electro beats and it is not until the closing tracks that his inimitable character finally comes to centre stage.
More generally, throughout the album Smith's vocals seem to have been mailed in. It's not that the lyrical content is at odds with the music, both are oblique and impenetrable. More that they never really sync, as though two utterly different groups have been conceived and play to two different audiences. However, on closing tracks 'Jbak Lois Lane' and 'Dearest Friends' the Mouse on Mars elements of the group seem to slide into the background, content to produce mere muzak to accompany Smith, and although this dilutes the impact of the album, the two halves of the group do seem to work together here. Smith returns to his element at the front of the stage, but at the expense of the remainder of the group.
Overall 'Tromatic Reflexxions' seems to waste a little of the talent of both parties, either smothering Smith in an unfamiliar environment, or reducing the production to mere backing for his wordplay. The album is also heavily front loaded, virtually crawling to a bed after a hard night. The last two or three tracks are the hangover to the bombastic opening and lack the real spark and momentum gained early on. Whilst it is modern, ingenuitive and refreshing the ideas need more work to make them accessible to either side of the dance/rock divide.
Stream 'Fledermaus Can't Get It' from 'Tromatic Reflexxions' HERE.
Artists in this article: Von Sudenfed
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