Fleischwald

What to do with this oddity of an album? Much like a modern-art painting (you know, one of the ones with splatters of various fleshy colours and extrusions of unidentifiable medium or origin scattered all across the canvas – if that really is canvas under there), I can certainly understand how TotenmonD would have an incredibly limited range of appeal. Yet, for some reason, here they are, in my music library. And I sit here, listening in profound awe to the massive, disparate sounds on Fleischwald, in much the same way Alan Ruck gazed transfixed at Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte at the art museum in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . Even as I write this review, it is still difficult to wrap my brain around the music from the first feedback-riddled twang on Pazzer’s guitar in ‘Kadavernazion’ to the minimalistic pounding and creepy beat poetry of ‘Rauhbau’, even though it continues to transmit signals from my ears down to my typing fingers and telling me that this music is actually pretty fucking enjoyable on a brute-force gut level. To say it is ‘progressive death metal with punk influences’ as the site description has it is technically correct, but sadly deficient, and to say that the music is simply indescribable or a style all TotenmonD’s own would be a complete cop-out in an Encyclopaedia Metallum review, so naturally I’ll give it me best shot.

First off, I should say that ‘subtlety’ is in not exactly TotenmonD’s all-German lexicon here. The sound is unpolished, raw, even basic, and yet the downtuned, distorted guitars and drums bear down on you with all the force and inevitability of an oncoming 20,000-tonne freight train, and that’s really all they play with. Whether it’s doomy falling chord progressions at a trudging tempo (‘Tod und Niedergang’, ‘Fleischwald’) or an all-out crossover-thrash / crust frenzy with Pazzer frantically belting out his cryptic lyrics from atop this unstoppable piece of heavy and destructive machinery (often both in the same song, as in ‘Kadavernazion’), you can only hope to slow it to a crawl and even then it will still take you under, with chilling exactness and unshakeable determination (while Pazzer screams ‘Amen’ repeatedly as the machine grinds to a halt before going off in another direction). To say the music is disjointed and often jarring would be a massive exercise in understatement, but at the same time there is definite direction to it (so if you want to say it is ‘progressive’ you would be technically correct).

At the same time, some songs just ‘click’ right away. The thrashy hardcore (at least to begin with, before it transitions into a gloomy groove and back) number ‘Dekadenz ‘98’ is a perfect example. Every part of it makes perfect sense (musically, anyway) and it is a true, crusty headbanger. Same with ‘Das Beil und der Vater’ and ‘Das saure Kraut’ (belch and all!): aggressive, fast, groovy, straightforward, primed for slaying on a mass scale… at least until the extensive doomy sections which slow the killer riffs down to nearly a dead crawl. To my own tastes, these songs do stick out as definite highlights in the album. As a counterpoint, ‘Der Misanthrop’ is much more straightforward death metal, which seems like a rather funny and contrarian way to cover a well-known German punk band (but apparently TotenmonD love them some punk covers, to judge from the composition of Auf dem Mond ein Feuer). And yeah, then there’s ‘Rauhbau’. Six and a half minutes of minimalistic pounding and creepy beat poetry pretty much covers it.

As noted above, the sound here is incredibly raw and basic: guitars, bass, drums and one pissed-off Jerry death-metal roar. All of them wielded like a blunt instrument to the back of the head. They get the job done; you shouldn’t really be demanding any fancy mixing or effects from this beast. The lyrics are all in German, which oughtn’t to be too much of a turnoff if you’re afraid of not understanding them; from what little I gathered with my incredibly rusty high-school German, they don’t really make all that much sense in the original, either.

So… yeah. Not the easiest listen in my library by any stretch of the imagination, and not exactly written with the average metalhead in mind (insofar as there is such a thing as an ‘average metalhead’, that is). But not exactly a sawblade up the arse, either. Despite its disjointed queerness, this album still has a certain charm, to be recommended with some qualifications. Not bad for three self-described pissed-off Swabian teenagers with a drinking problem; not bad at all.

15 / 20