The Notwist: Better than their Best

Over the years Munich Germany’s The Notwist have grown from noisy post-hardcore, through techno experimentation, into a sort of warm-hued if downcast electro-pastoralism. Their two-album artistic peak, 2003’s Neon Golden and ‘08’s The Devil and You and Me marked them as a sort of soft landing of German industrial and post-hardcore into a shoegaze-y middle age.

With their new record Close to the Glass a certain level of playfulness returns which had mostly disappeared on their ’08 album. The techno elements have re-emerged to the foreground and often play slightly off time, creating brief incongruities with the vocal and instrumental elements hinting at the avant-garde without becoming thoroughly alienating. For example in the lead in to the album’s first track Signals. Clicks, pulses, and echoes run together without entirely syncing up before the vocal comes in and seems to anchor the action with a characteristically ruminative Notwist melody.

Elsewhere the album takes on a more conventionally post-rock flavor. The bright and fuzzed-out tracks Kong and Seven Hour Drive evokes the Velvet Underground/Jesus and Mary Chain/Yo La Tengo family tree.

But ultimately where Notwist are at their best are in richly multi tracked yet some how austere songs like the single Run Run Run that through a combination of minor key melody and tightly controlled electronic elements evoke futility and loneliness; like an assembly line robot whose learned to love.

If Neon Golden was a brave step into techno tinged post-rock and The Devil and You and Me was a perfectly realized exercise in monomaniacal melancholy, Close to The Glass is the statement of a band in easy command of its complete range.