DELILAH – s/t

(CD, Zach)

My grandma had a seven inch single with “Delilah” on it, but in the germanized version sung by the great Peter Alexander, not in the oversexed Tom Jones version. I used to listen to that when I was a little kid. And Adamo’s “Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen”. And the smurfs-song Sometimes it all seems like it was only yesterday..

Somewhere along the line these last weeks I lost my faith in noiserock, seeing as it lost its focus somewhere in the hazy shades of the universe that exists between Prurient and the reunion of Helmet. Hazy shades have always been bad for noiserock. Concentration and the big bang, that is what is needed. Still needed, after all these years. Especially when a certain someone said to me: AmRep? Has that got something to do with Ambient? Hell no! If Ambient is the oh so fine and academic emulation of living and breathing space, then Noise rock is a punch in your face with a drunken fist, goddammit. These days also intellectuals and academically trained people end up in drunken barroom brawls and fisticuffs exchanged late at nights in streetcorners usually busy with people, but deserted long before midnight. By the shine of windowlights nothing much seems the same. The darkness changes a lot of things.

Delilah from Linz, Austria, are heavy hitters and slow evolvers at the same time. In their rather long collections of riffs with interspersed mellow and clearer parts, that they call songs, they ride a heavy wave after the other, but give you short pauses to rearrange your exhausted body. Sometimes it is like they stripped down the basics of a half a dozen of the most important noise rock bands (you name them) and then hacked those into bits and re-arranged them into songs. So, maybe they are basically a jazz band that just happens to play distorted, loud rockmusic. But quite contrary to this descriptions their music is exciting and full of energy. Even when they sway back and forth in another slower, pensive part. Don’t worry, they’ll break it up soon enough to bang and blast like the first 30 seconds of this EP.

No holds barred, no guidelines respected, no genre markers interesting enough to be of any interest. The only rule is, there are no rules. What seemed like a good basis for the production of art – any kind of art – is still good today. Delilah don’t fence themselves in, except for what could be a basic belief or a gut feeling rooted deep inside their spines, that says: noise rock rules. This way of working always bears the risk that the artist falls between all seats and gets ignored by all parties. Except for those with open ears, because those are looking between the seats. It might work along principles such as these: The more energy you put in it, the more you’ll get back. If you lay low and play some mellow, then you may get back to rocking even more heavily. If the idea of a viola in a song with distorted guitars sounds good, do it. If the song takes nine minutes to be a complete song, then it takes nine minutes to complete the song. Improvisation is okay if you are careful about it. Print these guidelines, hang them on the wall of the rehearsal room and then paint over it in thick blue and black with little sprinkles of red and white.