einstürzende neubauten: alles in allem

After more than 12 years, Einstürzende Neubauten's long-awaited new studio album Alles In Allem is finally going to be released. The album marks the quintessence of the band's output, opening yet another unexpected door in 40 years of ongoing sound research by a very experimental group of musicians around Blixa Bargeld. This band, like nearly no other, has managed to create a musical cosmos. It has, in fact, built up its own genre by uniquely combining edgy sound with sophisticated poetry. Appropriately, in the Year of the Rat -- the symbol of ingenuity and versatility according to the Chinese zodiac -- the band is not resting on the laurels of its last four decades. Instead, it curiously continues to explore everything that the sound universe has to yield, with one eye on the future and with boundless playfulness The unique sound and textual landscapes of the band, founded in 1980 in Berlin, reveal the timelessness that Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, and Rudolph Moser have continuously maintained. And yet, through experimental approaches to songwriting, instruments developed over four decades and collective input, the band sounds remarkably cutting edge within its own time. In fact, through its individual brand of music the Einstürzende Neubauten seem to always command each and every manifestation of the here and now -- whether industrial in its early years, the driving beats of the 1990s or its more considered later work. The verse "Wir hatten tausend Ideen / Und alle waren gut" (We had a thousand ideas / And all of them were good) from album track "Am Landwehrkanal" could easily be perceived as the band's description of itself. The sum total is a special compilation: Alles In Allem, Einstürzende Neubauten's first regular studio album in 12 years, presents an incomparable band that defies categorization to create a genre all its own.