The Notwist: The Devil, You + Me
By Team JamBase Aug 4, 2008 • 9:40 am PDT

We’ll remember good lies/ When we carry them home/ with us to our bedside table/ and our coffee sets.
There’s a powerful, mantra-like quality from the onset of The Devil, You + Me (released June 17 on Domino), the long awaited sixth album from Munich, Germany’s The Notwist. Tied together with ontological threads as strong as steel and smooth as polished chrome, their first full-length offering in six years has the complicated mass of ever-zeitgeist-y Radiohead but delivered in a fascinatingly unique way, all the intellectual gusto given breath and pagan zest. After the opening lyric, quoted above, they pause, letting the instruments hum down to a murmur as singer-guitarist Markus Acher sighs, “Let’s just imitate the real until we find a better one.” It’s the kind of open-ended directness and salient simplicity that infuses everything here with strange truthiness. For anyone looking for signs of our times, well, the Devil just pulled up a chair and offered us a fresh cup of coffee.
Peppered with quietly chilling observations like “There’s no escape from the circling place,” The Notwist’s latest was well worth the time they put into paring back their earlier crackling inventions to reveal something timely, honest, penetrating and healing. Just because many pronouncements are distressing doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly valuable to have them tossed into the light, left to wriggle under our gaze, exposed for what they are. If at times the album seems to suggest we’d be better off flying into the cosmos instead of wading through the grime on Earth, well, only a fool couldn’t understand the urge.
Equal parts roughhewn folk tropes and glitch-tastic futurism, The Devil, You + Me is unencumbered by style categories and fashion. Instead, they drill down to the base water of things, drawing up humidity and mineral spirit, which they ladle out in beautiful scoops. Radiohead is surely a comrade, though this feels less thought out, less worried over than recent efforts by that band. This is elementally natural, a pure thing plucked from the cosmos. Such is the skill of Acher, his sibling Michael (bass), Martin Gretschmann (aka Console) (programming) and Andi Haberl (drums) that something as nuanced and creatively charged as this feels wholly organic. They touched on this vibe on 2002’s stunning Neon Golden but the intervening years have intensified the feeling profoundly. Today, they shimmer with the unusual, yet oddly familiar glow of bands like Explosions In The Sky and Boards of Canada with the added somersault of observant, culture paraphrasing lyrics delivered with a wounded intensity that cuts both ways. Just as it’s not always easy to take what they’re dishing out, I can only imagine the preparation of this cerebral, heartfelt banquet was no easy thing.
For the right listeners – the ones that allow music to seep into their lives like rain striking hard, dry ground – The Devil, You + Me is a masterpiece. That’s a word I use VERY sparingly, as one should all such overloaded power language, but in this case it happens to fit.
JamBase | Off Planet
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