Of course, we missed Das Ich. The band's dark lyricism, expressed through industrial-inspired electronic music with a neoclassical touch, was emblematic of a group of artists known as ‘Neue Deutsche Todeskunst’ (‘New German Death Art’) within the German gothic scene of the 1990s, which was broadly described as ‘darkwave’. No less than nineteen years have passed since the band's last album, Cabaret; some of the darkwave bands of the same generation have started to go round in circles, others have embarked on musical adventures far removed from their original inspirations or have disappeared, while the new darkwave scene that has emerged since then has proved to be much more sober, reviving the haunting coldness of coldwave. And no matter how much we enjoyed it, we have to admit that we really wanted to rediscover the frenzied theatricality embodied by Das Ich.
The band took a long break from writing music: singer Stefan Ackermann was seriously ill, while keyboardist Bruno Kramm devoted himself to his political activism against digital surveillance. And then, just when we had given up waiting for them, Das Ich returned this year with a ninth album entitled Fanal! We are both delighted and a little worried: will it sound as good as expected, nineteen years later? The last album made a strange impression on us, successfully renewing Das Ich's electronic sounds but less rough than the previous ones. What will it be like this time?
The answer lies somewhere between Stefan Ackermann's disturbing whispers and his desperate rage, between the saturated electronic sounds that hammer away at us in binary rhythm and the sounds of orchestral string instruments that pierce our hearts: Fanal brings us back what we love about Das Ich: its dramatic intensity, its heightened theatricality, its rich and carefully constructed soundscape. All of this is deliciously articulated, with Das Ich playing with rhythms, sounds and vocal styles in a way that is both captivating and frightening; we bounce from one room to another in this sort of musical haunted house. It's true that the sounds don't surprise us this time around: unlike Cabaret, the duo has chosen to simply reconnect with what they did best in EBM in the past, particularly Egodram. If this album had been released fifteen years ago, we might have regret that, but not now: it's been too long since we've had this kind of sound to sink our teeth into, and that's not the main thing; the main thing is the rhythms and melodies, which are new and devilishly effective.
The intimidating and furious universe created by the album is all the more appreciated because its raison d'être is not limited to personal sensibilities, as we might have expected given Bruno Kramm's commitment: while the tracks contain ancient references (Lazarus, Brutus, Prometheus), Das Ich was inspired by the way the world is evolving in the present, where technology is used to establish technocratic dictatorships and gigantic accumulations of wealth in the hands of a few, built on the common cultural heritage and personal data of millions of people. There is indeed cause for fear and revolt; the album's fanal is both a warning and a hope.
So we really like Fanal. While the two singles Lazarus and Brutus are effective and powerful, we like the tracks that develop their atmosphere even more: in the middle of the album, Vanitas and Dantes Hölle are two black pearls in this regard, the first based on a slow, tortured build-up, the second dancing to perfection. There is one track that we struggle with, however: Prometheus, with its jerky rhythm, lacks the depth to really carry us away, but we quickly forget it thanks to the long final piece Genesis (Urknall), which ends on a high note before the remixes of the two singles. While Das Ich may not reassure us, their return is comforting!
