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This leftfield yet surprisingly accessible band from Dusseldorf, Germany has been a big hit with elements of the indie rock crowd, though that association hardly begins to describe what Kreidler's remarkable music sounds like. The core group consists of former art school students Thomas Klein, Andreas Reihse and Detlef Weinrich. Their forte is rhythmic instrumentals that straddle rock, synthpop, club techno, ambient, dub, repetitive minimalism and always some degree of avant-garde strangeness. Their brand of Krautrock shows an amazing flair for meshing harmony and noise. It's precise music rather than Berlin-school psychedelic - they hail from from the Cologne side of the Krautrock divide after all - but it's still poetic, engaging, even other-worldly at times. In America Kreidler has been labelled post-rock, but is that term even remotely useful? Their early albums date from the 1990's and are interesting but fairly derivative, traversing Krautrock terrain very similar to that explored by fellow Germans Kraftwerk, Faust and Cluster in the 1970's. On the self-titled album Kreidler from 2000, however, the band creates enough distance from its influences to craft a distinctive sound. The music is a kind of bridge between the old-school ambient and art rock of the 70's and the sounds of the techno and dance music generation. There's electronic beats, bleeps and metronomic repetition but also rock drumming, treated guitars and/or lovely old keyboards and synths on tracks like "Circles" and "Sans Soleil". Even when the music is not melodic ("Do It") it's oddly engaging and hypnotizing nonetheless. Meanwhile, the lush strings on "Bewitched" hint at the style of the band's next two releases. The mini album Eve Future and its big sister Eve Future Recall unexpectedly embrace classical motifs and chamber orchestrations in brilliantly original ways. It's a kind of eclectic, intimate chamber music for the modern world, soundtracks for films that haven't been made yet. It's melodic and structured, like Baroque music. In parts it is very simple and develops gradually, like the 20th century minimalism of Philip Glass et al. Some of its melodies echo folk and pop. A good deal of the instrumentation is actually sampled electronics, yet such is Kreidler's programming chops that many of these tracks sound like the work of live players. Featured sounds include strings, harp, vibraphone, piano, woodwinds, kettle drums and - last but not least - the glorious glockenspiel. Ending a five year wait since Eve Future Recall, the excellent Mosaik 2014 leaves the classical sounds behind for more familar rock-electronica territory, picking up where the Kreidler album left off. The band is still pushing, testing, trying new things, discarding the rubbish and leaving us with beautiful, strange, innovative instrumentals. This time there's lots of pulsing, complex, mid-tempo rhythms and futuristic synth stabs and washes, creating a mood with undeniable science fiction undertones. "European Grey" is a stunner, perfect driving music with epic keys washing out to the horizon and a series of polyrythmic patterns relentlessly powering it on. As good as Mosaik 2014 is, Kreidler's 2011 release Tank is quite possibly their masterpiece. Featuring consistently longer tracks then ever before - averaging seven minutes - the band fashions a series of lumbering, intense, rock-inflected jams with fantastic drumming from Thomas Klein. Remarkably the album was recorded virtually live in the studio with a minimum of post-production, showing what a superb live band they've become. Melodically simple, texturally complex, sonically heavy and deeply trance-inducing; Tank is a 21st century vision of Krautrock without peer. |
