When they emerged in 1980, brandishing instruments custom-made from scrap metal, road drills and confrontational attitude, Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) were literally incendiary, banned for damaging venues while unleashing records of post-punk cacophony. For 20 years from 1983, founder-mainstay Blixa Bargeld also led a double life injecting spectral guitar atmospherics and unpredictable edge into Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, while Neubauten’s sound evolved throughout the 90s into an evocative collision between decayed cabaret and subversive noise.
Their eighth album, Silence Is Sexy, originally released on Mute in 2000 and coinciding with the five-piece line-up’s 20th anniversary, is still rated as a peak. It references every aspect of their extreme sonic smorgasbord, from panel-beating uproar through Alies’ metallic disco whoop to Bargeld’s wryly delivered, creepingly-atmospheric slowies – the distended title track an exercise in skin-tingling, pin-drop dynamics (on which Bargeld’s credited with playing “cigarette”).
The ostensibly gentle but subtly unsettling Heaven Is Of Honey and spooked, clanking Die Befindlichkeit Des Landes highlight how The Bad Seeds benefited from Bargeld’s unorthodox strategies on similar forays – except here they’re allowed to run amok. Reissued on the band’s label, the album also features original Germany-only closing track, Anrufe In Abwesenheit, concluding a work of remarkable breadth and uncompromising vision.
