Rammstein - 'Reise Reise' (Universal)
4/5
By: Kevin Molloy
'Reise, Reise' - 'Journey, Journey' in translation. It almost reads like a question for Rammstein: just where has a decade taken them? Four albums down the line, and this their fifth, they've certainly proved their constancy. But their productive ethic had left their sound rather static; more motionlessly refining their art than voyaging through genre.
At first 'Reise, Reise' seems to take (or stand-still on) the same route. The titular opener grinds with a stately majesty, huge guitars and growling vocals completing the now formulaic sound. This is by no means a wholly negative thing. The six strings are f**king titanic, pounding the air across oceans of eddying strings and organs. This is what most contemporary metal aspires to achieve, and fails; a megalithic throne with the royalty of metal is hard to come by, but Rammstein are well on their way to carving their own. And the scale of the LP is as grandiose as the imagery... whole choirs are pulled into the studio for ten seconds' worth of track time.
Yet not all is as we've come to expect. As highlight 'Amerika' starts to rock in the outro you feel them start to limber up to their task. The drum sound becomes more expansive and massive; the riff gains the loose, swaggering pout of zeppelin, just squeezing through that excruciatingly stiff German upper-lip. Upon facial expressions, is there a smile being cracked to boot? Unfathomable it might seem, but rhyming 'coca cola' and 'wonder bra' with 'vunderbar' (fantastic) has a much greater comic effect on the listener than we've come to expect. And we swear there's an intentional glimpse of self-depreciatory humanity behind the aural barrage.
But you can wipe the smirk from your face, be not misled. Rammstein remain, on the whole, a band that take themselves very seriously. They ominously grumble, 'this is not a love so, no this is not my mother tongue' in the kind of voice you might endow a seriously pissed-off grizzly bear with. Rammstein stick by this linguistic ethic; all but two of the tracks are Germanic, and by Thor it doesn't make a jot of difference to us Anglophones. This is rawk; you're not meant to understand what they're saying...
Back to the standouts, though. The first is, again, 'Amerika', coming halfway through at number six. Whilst purportedly humorous, it charts an invasion of capitalism throughout the world, hence the bizarrely cheerful 'we're all living in Amerkia' refrain's more sinister undertones. If it all sounds a little cold war, you're probably right. Bridling up against 'Amerika' is 'Moskau', this time with the chorus in Russian and a disembodied female vocal answering the German growl with an eerie lack of comprehension. The pair easily make for the standout tracks on the album, battling for supremacy at the centre-point of the LP.
This double score creates a tearaway success for the German rocksters; they tower above the surrounding songs, which were pretty darn good to start with. Of particular note in this bracket is 'Los', a grinding groove layered with acoustic guitars. It still comes in for stonking-big riff treatment, but with shades of subtlety Rammstein hadn't yet painted. Here Rammstein have taken a small but significant step, by not simply getting better at what they do (which they have), but by also moving the goalposts to a more remote, artistic setting.
A fine album by anybody's standards; and all the indications are things are only going to get louder.
Artists in this article: Rammstein
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