WIPEOUT

Black light district boys

CD/2LP, Trost

I have laboured hard to write something about Wipeout because they are so much way beyond my grasp. Then I realised, that the whole explanation might be right there in the first song: “my simple love”. This is what the singer explains: Theories and explorations build up textures and textures build up geometries, geometries of a simple love, eventually a matrix of a song. And the main point is the hope to create a window to the heart of the loved one (i.e. the listener?) so that the geometry and the matrix of the little and simple love is felt and vibrated along with by the heart. Then again, I am not sure. There are no simple answers with Wipeout, might they brag as much as they want that their love is “simple”. It sure isn’t. Some people easily fall for simple answers and even believe that they are true – such as thinking that the songs “Der kleine König “(the little king) and “Allianz der kaputten Streber” (alliance of the corrupt swots), by the way the only songs sung in German on this record – are about nothing else but the current political situation here in Austria. Actually, that is way to short and does not at all answer all the issues and metaphors pronounced in that song. There are no simple answers, as there is no simple love. If it is simple, then it is wrong.

For “Black light district boys” the three musicians behind Wipeout have not only dived into the most seedy parts of town, the streets where all the bad boys go to find a live that abides only to the rules made up by the streets, a complex and all-encompassing codex of does and don’ts that decide between life and death. They have also travelled back in time, producing an up-to-date version of EBM and electronic Industrial akin to what everybody has looked for at the end of the Eighties, but was left bled dry lying in the streets. Wet and black streets, of course. Fadi Dorninger and Dieter Kern have produced an impressive, pulsing and hammering basis of straight beats, noise and synthesizer-walls for Didi Bruckmayer to perform his vocals on. Nowadays, I don’t like the word “perform” anymore, because of all the star-search-idiots, who are always talking about “going out there and performing”, which doesn’t even mean singing and dancing, but rather nothing more than going through the motions that they have learned before. The word has really been abused and misused to death. But the way Bruckmayr sings, talks, screams and changes between modal tones of his voice can only be described with performing in the best sense of the word. While the music in the background hammers and rocks back and forth, sometimes harsh and driven by a demonic factory-pulse, at other times like a big swamp being flooded by a black, sludgy sea, Bruckmayr performs with an incredible intensity and theatralic (again, in the best sense of the word) range, from pathos to conspirative.

Maybe the Eighties haven’t left us, as much as I wish they finally would, and maybe the never will. I guess there is a lot of interesting music that was produced before 1989, when I started to really get interested in music, but all I usually get bombarded with is stupid New Wave that has been deformed into drunken party-music. Can I afford to get interested in Industrial and EBM more deeply nowadays? Actually, I would rather like to hear Wipeout play a version of “It’s my party and I cry if I want to”. Because Wipeout are one of the few bands / projects able to take up the heritage of what the Eighties really were (which is in short words: fucked up) and who might feel the urge to do so. Their flexibility and the mutations in sound and atmosphere they create from one record to the next are sometimes hard to follow and believe. “Black light district boys” is definitely their most openly darkest and “Industrial” record, whatever that means. From the disturbing artwork to the brooding vocals to the apocalyptic music, this one is actually heavier than most metal-records. From the more atmospheric and slower songs, to those with harsher and wilder pulses, this one is far better than most records.