Urlaub In Polen - All - LP/CD/DD - Tapete Records / Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge - Der Grosse Preis - LP/CD/DD - Bureau B
Two German-speaking electro-rock duos from the same label umbrella but with very different interchangeable styles.
Musicians Jan Philipp Janzen (drums) and Georg Brenner (everything else including vocals) make something of an engaging progressive motorik noise under the moniker Urlaub in Polen. All is their sixth full-length set, coming nearly a decade after the preceding Boldstriker and sonically takes no prisoners.
Fancy surfing down the Rhine on a hot summer's day? You'll need Impulse Response, a sort of surf-style Krautrock epic that continues in similar hurried and minimal form as T.H.D.T.. For those familiar with both the Tapete and Bureau B imprints, I had to check twice that this was on the latter rather than the usually poppier former. Any one of these tracks could sit comparably with the likes of Automat, Kreidler or Station 17 - in fact, there's some out-and-out avant-gardism at play on a few of the interlude tracks, particularly Rodeo with its brutal cut-ups and glitching.
Janzen and Brenner certainly know how to mix things up though - the closing Proxy Music is a departure from the minimalist drum and guitar formula of the album and sounds like a theme to a lost '90s cop programme set in Miami (you know the one). A curiosity outside of the norm.
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Perhaps slightly less abstract is the debut full-length opus from synth duo Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge. Together, messrs Niklas Wandt and Joshua Gottmanns wend their way through an icy electronica landscape, full of hooks, melodies and complex lyrics and bordered by some thumping beats and portentous atmospherics.
On the opening title-track ladies and gentlemen, we are well and truly floating in space before entering the mesmerising mid-paced Gelb's Groove, a sort of woozy soulful Germanic take on Yello's hypnotic and velveteen balladry. The lyrics on these and indeed the entire album are in German but this adds to the experience rather than confuses your delicate English ears.
'The Grand Prize' is by turns rooted in the '80s and squinting at the future with the sun in its eyes and a pop tune in its heart. We're not quite talking inevitable tiresome comparisons to Trio or Die Krupps but Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge's ouevre isn't so detached from the genre as to be an unlikely bedfellow. Marktplatz and Haare certainly flirt with the coldwave of European discotronica of yesteryear, evoking the grittier seitenstraßen of Berlin or Hamburg on a wet Wednesday night, juxtaposed by jaunty drum-machines and post-industrial basslines.
★★★★★★★☆☆☆