Half band, half predictive-texting nightmare, Einstürzende Neubauten – Blixa Bargeld’s Germanic experimental relief from being in the Bad Seeds – are famed for constructing their avant-garde noise pieces on custom-made instruments, from shopping-trolley harps to air-conditioning drums and percussion made from detritus they purloin from building sites at night. So you might expect them to play their recent first world war album, Lament, on rudimentary tunnelling equipment and twisted chunks of tank.
They do nothing so obvious. Lament is a challenging, intelligent and entrancing piece that traces the tides and tribulations of the first world war with a menacing invention. Kriegsmaschinerie mirrors the rising conflagration. It opens with the creaks and squeals of the wheels of war grinding into motion, building into a violent cataclysm that finds them playing a huge copper wall with a drill and beating on a makeshift barricade, while Bargeld holds up signs that reads: “War does not break out … it waits.” In de Loopgraaf (In the Trenches) has Bargeld rasping a desolate lament by Flemish writer Paul van den Broeck over the dull, rusted half-notes of a harp made from wire. For Achterland, Alexander Hacke saws a twisted melody out of a stringed hospital crutch. It’s War Horse meets Scrapheap Challenge.
The more disturbing moments, such as the Harlem Hellfighter soldier singing a grotesque show tune to lighten his spirits as bullets whizz by during On Patrol in No Man’s Land, are weighted with chilling historical commentary. The Willy-Nicky Telegrams has Bargeld and Hacke reciting communiques between cousins Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas of Russia as the war escalates, and for Der 1 Weltkrieg (Percussion Version) the band hammer an array of drainpipe tubes, each representing a country added to the rhythm as they entered the war, each beat marking one day of fighting. It lasts 13 unsettling minutes.
There are glimmers of light as the band play crackly hand-held recordings of POWs reciting Bible passages over sunrise strings on Lament three, Pater Peccavi, and create their own We’ll Meet Again on the victorious All of No Man’s Land Is Ours. But the mud and gore of Lament sticks and hardens, tough to brush out.
