THE NOTWIST

Neon Golden

LP/CD, City Slang

Sometimes this happens with records with me – I cannot listen to them. No fault by the music certainly, it is all in the circumstances. As soon as I put on the record, somebody drops in and starts talking to me, the telephone rings, dinner is ready or something reminds me that I actually have to be somewhere else and have to go now. Somehow that happens from time to time, and the effect is, that I know the first few songs on that record nearly by heart, while the rest always seems new to me. Makes listening to that record, if I manage to listen through the whole thing, rather weird. The first few songs I hum along, make myself comfortable in a place I already know very well, and suddenly, I fall out of the place I know and everything is new. That is puzzling, to say the least.

The Notwist make that experience rather pleasant, actually, for two reasons. First, the Notwist produce very pleasing songs and sounds, leave no open spaces that turn into traps, but rather lull you into their own web of allusions, dreams and citations. Secondly, whatever the Notwist do, they do it very well. So any surprise is a good surprise, any “new” song you’ll hear by them, is a good song. Just listen to “Pilot”, the first single-outtake, and you’ll know what a perfect pop-song is all about.

Another funny thing is the all-around hype around this band / record. As soon as the Notwist release a new record, they make it onto the titles of all the important magazines in their genre. Funny, ain’t it? How does a German, white-boy, slacker-band, that produces a very original and individual mixture of electronica and Indie-pop (in the Nineties-sense of the word, surely) replace all the hard-edged ghetto-rappers, new metal-body builders, brit-pop-sensations and country-rockers-gone-superstars? And all that with a record that is something like the most overboarding understatement I have heard in a long time. And another thing that swept through the German magazines in relation to “hype” is, how the usual German meta-discussion about hypes in general was left out with the Notwist and everybody stepped in eagerly. I mean, nearly every article about, e.g. The Strokes, started with a paragraph about how strange that thing “hype” actually is, how did it happen and why this band? And then nobody gave any answers, since asking questions is always way easier than providing answers.

As I realise while writing this, in this instant I am taking up the chore of writing a paragraph about “hype” and asking all the relevant questions, but I will give you an answer: The Notwist is the best thing to come out of Germany for a long time. Maybe since David Bowie recorded “Heroes” with Brian Eno. So, there you have it. Maybe I have overdone it, put you put me in a corner, and in cases like that, I get all out defensive-aggressive. There are other bands in Germany, who mix electronica and Indie-pop, sing in a gentle, low voice and introduce perfect melodies in their songs, e.g. one of my favourite bands: Deep (Dhyana Records), but they never reached that level of perfection. There are of course other reasons than creativity and genius, which might be that The Notwist have lots of money to spend in the studio (at least in relation to Deep) and making music is all they do, while other musicians still have to work dayjobs, which uses up a lot of energy. That doesn’t make “Neon Golden” any worse, the opposite is true: a lot of good work has gone into this record and the results were well worth the effort.

Another point of perfection is the compact design and structure of the whole record. The songs build up a whole, but also the record cover evokes stirring images of old Chinese drawing-art, with the black circle on red ground. Which adds to the title – “Neon Golden” – which is nothing more than a short equation of the view you get, when looking from a hilltop over Tokyo, with all its neon lights, shining skyscrapers and the glow of the city light illuminating the pitch-dark nightly sky over the city. Am I anywhere close with my interpretation? Also the big booklet is a lesson in modern lay-out under the maxim that less is more.

“Neon Golden” is a record with many sides and facettes, that you can sink into, get woven into or drown into.