4 out of 5

Label: Potomak

Produced by: Einstürzende Neubauten

It’s only 1981 and its already freakin’ brutal up in here.

Kollaps, the first widely available Einstürzende album, is stunningly pummeling.  Yes, I’ve been trawling the music landscape long enough to know that there’s been surprisingly extreme music (extreme by various degrees) poking through most decades, but often you’re digging at the fringes for that stuff.  Einstürzende may not be a household name, but I also wouldn’t classify them as fringe; there’s enough awareness regarding their output – including Kollaps, at the time – that to listen to this album with time-adjusted ears as something that didn’t immediately make people spit take and deem the group outlaws is fascinating.  Even as a dude with casual EN experience, the whole power-tools-make-the-band aesthetic didn’t quite prepare me for the power drill that opens track 2.  And far away from being simple shock tactics, there’s a clear passion and fervor in Blixa Bargeld’s strained, repeating bleats of vocals and F.M. Einheit’s / N.U. Unruh’s junk percussion, all reverbing with sweaty intent.  That is: this musical destruction/reconstruction feels absolutely demanded by the group’s creativities and emotions, which is what makes the industrial clatter incredibly engaging, swinging between marching beats and longer form echo chambers – including the title track – and, masterfully, moments to breathe, a la the raw-but nigh-delicate Sehnsucht.

It’s truly an experience like none other, which is insane to say, 35+ years on.

After that 8 minute title track, the group, and album, admittedly seems to mostly run out of steam – Sehnsucht is compelling but too brief – the last couple tracks not really stirring much, but at that point, the experience has burned hard, so the embers are appropriately smoking anyway.

The reissue version(-s, from like 2003 and on) also includes tracks from  Stahldubversions (an early cassette of some pre-album base tracks), which aren’t exactly dub but are too short and informed to be all that interesting.  Listened to as a component of the whole album, it drags down the ending, so I prefer to consider those as purely an extra.