Evil Madness – Super Great Love 7.5

                 Evil Madness is a super-group of Scandinavian bands you’ve never heard of: Stilluppsteypa, BJ Nilsen, and Johann Johannsson. Despite most of these performers’ positions in the extreme avant-garde (even by their own label’s standards, Emego, they are obscure) this is a fun record with a good sense of humor. Those familiar with the tongue-in-cheek irony of Trans Am will need that attitude to get through these songs.

                 This music is extremely playful. Arpeggios are literally strewn all over the place. A more than passing resemblance to an updated Kraftwerk is unavoidable: Evil Madness holds an affinity for old equipment and certain skewed pop sensibilities.

                A surprisingly large of electronic genres gets close scrutiny. Trance is here in tracks like “Divine Sensual Love Fantasy” (yes, the song’s title is part of the joke). Some of the songs seem to share a lot in common with Soft Pink Truth’s approach to dance music, just enough kitschy humor to make it enjoyable. 

                Other songs appear to draw strength from hyper-active pop music. “Café Eindhoven” would be the smash hit if Evil Madness was interested in hits, which it clearly isn’t. It stomps, raves up, and generally goes insane. But the longest song “Maxim’s Goldfinger” which includes distorted vocals is the most fun on here. Towards the end it completely gets cut up mere inches away from death. 

                Basically, this is a group of normally experimental musicians having some fun within the confines of trashy pop techno. Due to their training and practice, it is a surprisingly enjoyable affair.

Atom TM: Liedgut 6.6

Uwe Schmidt begins his move towards less gimmicky music. For those of you not familiar, he has indulged himself heavily in the Senor Coconut moniker for quite some time. Senor Coconut takes techno and has it re-interpreted by a full band, giving it Latin American embellishments.  El Baile Aleman was interesting, but continuing the re-interpretations for a decade felt a bit of overkill.

Thankfully, with this he returns back to his roots of weird electronic music. Of course, there is a twist with this album, like he employs with all of his work. Here he focuses on the more romantic side of German music, mixing Franz Schubert with Kraftwerk (hence the robotic vocals). 

It starts off more abstract, and slowly he introduces the listener to warmer pastures. Unfortunately, some of the abstraction comes off a bit jokingly, which grates on one’s nerves. But it is over halfway through the 20 odd tracks when it doesn’t matter whether he is kidding.

“Weisses Rauschen” easily surpasses the rest of the material on here. It cleverly mixes the emotional with the clinical detachment that he’s been striving to hit the entire album. The gentle arrangement is surprisingly warm and tender; especially considering this is a Raster Noton release.

Overall, it isn’t a bad album. There’s a lot to enjoy here. But the problem I have is that a great amount of the suites are underdeveloped. And only at the end do you actually get what Uwe’s statement is supposed to be.  And without the beautiful German robotic singing (which is surprisingly touching) it would not be anywhere as lovely.