Pros: emotionally profound while still pleasantly jarring.
Cons: none.
The Bottom Line: This is an excellent album, showcasing a great band at their best. Few bands get better with time, but EN are one of them. Passionate and musically complex.
ivanova169's Full Review: Silence Is Sexy by Einsturzende Neubauten
Silence Is Sexy continues on the journey EN started with Tabula Rasa. EN were one of the bands to pioneer the "industrial" sound of the early '80s; their early albums had few, if any, recognizable instruments, as the band preferred to use metallic crashes and startling electronic noise. Nowadays, their music is much more musical, as singer Blixa Bargeld shows the range of emotion in his voice and his lyrical adeptness in both English and German.
Tabula Rasa shows a band tentatively experimenting with a change in direction, and while that album is also very good, some of the songs are weak and lack emotional impact. That is not at all the case with Silence Is Sexy. Every song has a full-fledged emotional and musical landscape. We have quiet songs about the nature of beauty, gently humorous drinking songs, and bombastically passionate songs that hark back to the sound of Haus der Luege and Halber Mensch.
I cannot recommend this album enough. If you have avoided later Neubauten because you believe the presence of quieter, more musical songs means that they have sacrificed edginess and originality for commercial accessibility, think again. Bargeld's aggressive snarls and shouts have evolved into much more subtle and lyrical vocals, but his ability to make the listener sit up and take notice is just as present, if not more. While their songs have become more musical, they are still utterly unique and still startle the listener with unexpected bursts of sound. Everything that made their earlier material great is still here; it is simply in subtler, more refined, more complex form.
There are few bands out there that have the integrity to follow their vision instead of sticking with a familiar formula, and there are few bands who have the talent to successfully build on the foundation their early sound provided and come up with something even better. Silence Is Sexy shows that Einstuerzende Neubauten fits the bill on both counts.
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