Kollaps

No sé qué voy a oír ... y puede que no lo sepa incluso después de oírlo. Me he guardado Kollaps, pero esto es más cultura musical que algo disfrutable hoy en día.

Whoa. This one comes at you aggressively. I was scared! Fortunately it pulls back a bit, and by the second time through I could appreciate the concept. Not an easy listen but I can imagine that this was hugely influential to industrial bands that followed.

On the other hand I saw a reviewer recommend a different album by the same band: Tabula Rasa. Hard to believe it’s the same band! I’m listening now and it’s lovely. The second track is downright peaceful. I wish this were the album chosen for the list, but on the other hand the power of Kollapse is intense and was probably inspirational for many other industrial musicians so I understand why it deserves the place.

Awesome and voting high moves Kid Rock to its correct location as worst album (because it is)

416/1089 - Some of the rhythms were fun but it's a bit one-note overall up until the ending "-dub" songs.

Congratulations, this is the worst album on this list! I’m only a little over half way through and can say that definitively.

1.54

Angry, raw and abrassive but overall very unapologetically chaos.

6/10 [KEEP*]

So work has been a bit shit lately; loads of stress and frustration. The other day I was headed into work dreading a presentation while simultaneously lamenting the fact that I didn’t even have time to give said presentation with all of the actual work I needed to do. Well, I’d been listening to a lot of early Nick Cave at the time, but somehow even the Birthday Party wasn’t able to cut through the mood I was in. I ended up putting on Halber Mensch by Einstruzende Neubauten and suddenly I felt a weight off my chest. I followed Halber Mensch with Kollaps and Kollaps with Tabula Rasa. I don’t know what it is about their music specifically, but it gave me the catharsis I needed to right myself and keep pressing on.

For a more light hearted aside, I absolutely love that someone thought it was a good idea to have Einstruzende Neubauten open for U2 during their Zoo TV Tour. They were apparently thrown off the tour after the first show when they threw an iron bar into a booing crowd. Personally, the only thing I find surprising here is that they were given the opportunity to open for U2 in the first place. Like, there aren’t many bands that would even have iron bars available to throw into a crowd in such a situation, but obviously Einstruzende Neubauten would.

Anyways, this is an album that I love. It’s also an album that I would not recommend to most people, but I will still argue it absolutely should be on a list of 1001 albums you should hear before you die. It's a bit of a paradox.

It's not too bad - I actually quite like the title track, "Sado-Masodub", and "Spionagedub". Rhythm dominant music is quite fun, as it feels like getting pushed around aurally. Also, anything is better than music that feels like a sneeze which never arrives!

You know that pattern in my reviews where sometimes when this site gives me a really awful album, it follows it up with a really good album? Well, with Kollaps, this site did the exact opposite by being the follow up to Rocks. And yeah, It is a terrible album. It tried to be unique by incorporating various found items into it's sound like metal plates which basically means that this album was recorded with literal garbage. This of course, was not executed well as this feels like some music that a little child would make with a lot of toys at their disposal rather than by actual professionals. This album still is incredibly annoying too with bad vocals and constant irritating sounds making this one of the worst albums on this site.
Best Song: Tanz Debil
Worst Song: Lunebest

I will not include the appended CD bonus tracks or 2002 re-release bonus tracks for this review.

Ahh, yes, one of the "worst albums" according to the global stats for this generator, and had me genuinely curious. For those who are unfamiliar, Einstürzende Neubauten is a German experimental music group led by Blixa Bargeld, who would later become a founding member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. One of the trademarks of the group is that they utilize self-made or found objects as instrumentation, such as metal plates. While they will use these unorthodox instruments for more conventional sounds in later recordings, their early work is notably harsh as Bargeld would scream and shout over banging and scraping metal percussion. Case in point, their debut album, Kollaps, is defined by that style.

This album can make or break people without more formal introductions to elements of industrial, experimental, and German music. Thankfully, I've taken multiple courses in music analysis back in college, and I got this record after over 300 albums into my journey, including records that would fit into the above categories. I can't imagine the poor soul who got this as their first album without any prior understanding or context of what the group is trying to accomplish here.

With that in mind, I do enjoy this record to an extent. There's an almost primal feel in the abrasive nature of Blixa's harsh vocals over the obtuse percussive elements that weirdly maintain a good sense of rhythm. It must be cathartic for a German music group coming out of post-World War II Berlin, trying to make a living, and experiencing both the frustration and vulnerability of what it must have taken to reconstruct, represented by the use of noises that would be associated with construction equipment. It certainly made for a unique experience that doesn't immediately deter me away, especially with how creative they get, such as the pitter patter of water before the visceral screaming on "Negative Nein" or the literal drill beat that opens "Steh auf Berlin", and the twisted instrumental rendition of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime... moi non plus" that adds a bit of black humor.

Yet, for as much as this album clicked for me, there are still issues I have with it. Besides the obvious lack of cohesion, which may be the point, some songs tend to make a more lasting impression than others. Given the multitude of short tracks that run under two minutes, there isn't as much room to allow the compositional identity to sink in before being launched into the next. This sentiment also extends to the closer "Helga", which felt abrupt as an ending with the ten seconds of radio transmission before cutting to silence.

Still, I was intrigued by Kollaps in all its outlandish execution. It's not an album that would easily get made in today's world, with the way the music marketing landscape has shifted, which makes this record feel special.

This made me anxious so I stopped listening.

It's hard work, but interesting, and a couple of good songs

German noise rock is so tedious. Three songs in and I’m hearing something that sounds like a bubbling, clogged toilet with some simple banjo picking - oh, and here comes the random scream/wail and the shouting in German.

It doesn't get better.

Surprisingly accessible, I was expecting something weirder and unlistenable but these are really just pop songs when you get past the banging and the angry German screaming.

The wild industrial percussion is definitely the highlight here for me. I love when bands use found objects for percussion. I can see the influence on other later industrial that I love like Nine Inch Nails. The vocals are a bit grating though.

I think this album psychologically damaged me. Thank you for ruining my day and eardrums. My only solace whilst listening to forks scraping against plates was that someone said it sounds like hitler is screaming at you. I would joke about this giving me a headache but it genuinely did give me a nasty one.

Run from it, hide from it, deny it, it comes all the same...

If this Einsturzende Neubauten album is truly one of the 1001 you have to listen to before you die, its probably best to make it your last. It's a full on sensory assault. An harsh dose of unadulterated, raw, violent, uncut sonic sodomy, from the first sound of a sledgehammer wrapped barb wire smashing your into your face to the death rattle of the rusty power drill that's being used to perform trepanation in order to release the pressure that's built up in your brain over the interminable 38 minutes required to listen to this magnum opus of German industrial revolution.

Now it would be easy, too easy, to preread the reviews and decide that a 1 is all that's required and move on with your day, but stop and appreciate the chaos, even if only for a few fleeting seconds. Maybe you'll appreciate the nuance of future industrial tools usage like Lee Ranaldo using power tools at the start of Sonic Youth's The Burning Spear....