Einsturzende Neubauten

2×4 (ROIR)
by Nik Rainey

And when talking rock music in extremis, who can bypass Einstürzende Neubauten, those nutty Krauts who matched the post-’45 ruins of the fatherland in musiological terms? Well, maybe I would if I saw them coming towards me on the street (I have a rule against associating with people named Mufti), but they can’t be beat (although they can when their chests are miked up) when it comes to vicarious entropy-as-songcraft in the safety of one’s own home. ROIR’s previously cassette-only 2×4, a collection of early live clatter from the goofy Teutons, has finally been remastered for CD, and it’s every bit what you’d expect: Junkyard brutalisms and vaguely Eastern grumble-drones, the kind of stuff that somehow increases in creepiness with the imperfect, remote ambience of the recordings, the sound of a distant insurgence as seductive as it is repellent. In the end, it probably has more appeal to the longtime EN-head than anyone else, but who knows – Kurt Loder (y’know, the old guy on MTV) wrote the liner notes and he seemed to like it just fine.