5 out of 5

Label: Metropolis

Producer: Rudy Ratzinger

Jesus, this is the one to get.  Odd, since it’s sort of an odds and ends collection, but unlike the rough feeling of ‘Blutkind’, everything works in this collections favor – the assortment of tracks, the sequencing, the production – it’s all aces.  Every :wump: album I’ve listened to has some moments of tedium, something that prevents you from wanting to spin it up right again, but Preferential Legacy – even at 2 discs, 30+ tracks – is eminently listenable, again and again.  As he did with ‘Blut,’ Rudy puts the new material right up front (which is sort of an honest approach that I dig, not making the listener have to sift through other material for the brand new goods), and god damn if ‘All Cried Out’ isn’t one of the best covers ever made, if not one of Rudy’s best tracks.  It’s a perfect example of playing the source music fairly straight, but filtering it through an artist’s particular sense of sound and style to make it a whole different beast.  Similar to Saul Williams’ take on ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ I couldn’t give a poo about Alison Moyet’s original, but the :wump: cover makes me want to stand on my chair and dance and sing along.  And then sure, why not, let’s swing it a completely different direction for our other new track ‘Overkill,’ which is a 7-minute ambient drone that doesn’t feel like 7-minutes at all.  After the pop of ‘Cried,’ it’s an effectively lumbering piece that leads perfectly into tracks from ‘Music for a Slaughtering Tribe,’ a mostly faster-paced version of :wump: that, to my ear, delivers superior German versions of tracks that ended up being English-ized on other releases – such as ‘Krieg’ and ‘Stirb im Winter’.  Rounding out the first disc are a good blend of heavy and ambient songs bouncing back and forth that never stick around too long, hovering at a good 5-minute mark where you get a totally memorable taste of doom and beats but not to exhaustion.  The second disc is an LP that came with an early :wump: release, apparently, along with some remixes.  Some of these tracks appeared on ‘Blut,’ but again, the context here – the tracks they’re sitting with – are totally different, so the repetition of ‘Throbberstalk’ has great company to make it something to tap your toe along to instead of skip, and the version of ‘Irak’ that’s on there trumps the shit out of the 45 different version on ‘Blut.’  Even the remixes are good, as they’re mostly vocal-less and just focus on music.  (…The ‘Born Again’ mixes with vocals tended to strip out the distortion and sound a bit too rave-y to me.)

SO I don’t know what to make of it.  A cover, and a compilation of old material somehow ends up being the best :wump: album I own, even though I’ve heard variations of these tracks scattered elsewhere.  The power of sequencing shines through again.  ‘Preferential Legacy’ has a touch of every :wumpscut: style for every listener, and is probably a good way for collectors to fill in some gaps in their collection.  (except we don’t do that nowadays, and collectors probably already have the originals BUT LEAVE ME ALONE OKAY)