Review Summary: Es ist gut.
Halber Mensch (Half Man), by Einstürzende Neubauten
Genres: Industrial, Noise
Release: September 2, 1985
Label: Some Bizarre
Figured it’s about time I finally wrote about the band whose frontman’s name I’ve s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶n̶ borrowed,
Einstürzende Neubauten, which translates roughly to Collapsing New Buildings, though most people just seem to call them Neubauten and everyone knows what they’re talking about. Neubauten are a German industrial band which takes the genre to the most literal extreme: most of their percussion is crafted from scrap metal, which more often than not results in some of the most inventive rhythms the genre has to offer. The band aren’t exactly without controversy; the band came into being during the time when Germany was bifurcated between Western Europe and the Iron Curtain, a time when architectural standards were substandard at the best of times. There were
altbauten (old buildings), which were and are centuries old and either survived World War II or were reconstructed, and
neubauten (new buildings), which had an unfortunate reputation for being cheaply built, shoddily designed, and less pretty than the
altbauten which preceded them, and the band received unwanted attention when the Berlin Congress Hall collapsed and killed someone. To give North American readers an idea of how insensitive Germans might have thought the name to be, imagine if less than a day after 9/11 happened, some dipshits got together and formed a punk band called Carpet-Bomb Manhattan.
Now if you’re wondering how the hell this band is in the same scene as
Throbbing Gristle,
Coil, and
Nurse with Wound, consider the meaning of the band’s name: it fits in perfectly with the classic industrial ethos of taking cultural landmarks of old and molding them into something new, and in that respect Neubauten’s music coincides nicely with the British industrial of the time. Up to this point, Neubauten made a name for themselves making anarchic but rhythmic anti-music, then came
Halber Mensch, which, perhaps due to frontman Blixa Bargeld playing with
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, saw their music become more structured, while still being some of the most literally industrial music there is. Having said that, the first song’s a cappella, so bear with me a moment.
The opener and title track is quite possibly the most evil a cappella arrangement in the history of anything, and I don’t say that lightly. The track opens with guest vocalists credited simply as Monika, Sabrine, Verene, and Ma Gita chanting the song’s title “Halber Mensch”, almost as if in light mockery of my transness, and even before the song properly gets underway those chants put me on edge because harmonies which would otherwise sound good on their own come together in jarring fashion. It sounds like their souls are in purgatory, screaming in agony, trying to drag you down with them. The chants quickly become a background to Bargeld and company singing about what I assume is either humanity getting subsumed by technology, or something more Jungian, a collective unconscious taking over someone to the point where aspects of their mind separate. Regardless, it’s the least industrial song Neubauten has ever recorded, but it’s still very industrial in imagery and ethos. Just check out these lyrics:
“Wir haben Wahrheiten für dich aufgestellt
(We’ve set up truths for you)
In ihren Rissen leuchten unsre sender
(Our transmitters shine in their fissures)
Zu jeder vollen Stunde sender wir deine Werte
(On the hour we broadcast your values)
Du siehst die sender nicht und Kabel hängen
Längst verlegt aus deinen Nerven-Enden längs des Wegs
(You don’t see the transmitters and cables laid long ago
Hanging from your nerve endings along the way)
The song has a strange ebb and flow to it; vocal layers often appear out of nowhere, at once congruent with the rhythm and only adding to the already strident harmonies, and disappear just as quickly. It’s a sort of push and pull that only gets more overwhelming as more layers are piled on top of each other, but then there’s a few seconds of silence, leaving only Blixa Bargeld by himself, singing about death claiming the victim they’ve been apparently singing to as the “Halber Mensch” chants reassert themselves, building to a climax that never arrives, though the brief silence between this song and the next is quite welcome given what a dissonant and jarring opener this is.
“Yü-gung (Fütter Mein Ego/Feed My Ego)” is a real blazer of a song, and it sounds like an antecedent to the industrial that was to come; the rhythm especially sounds to my ears like it could have been the backbone to
Ministry’s “Flashback”, but I digress. The rhythm section immediately demands attention. It’s a nice combination of the acoustic and electronic; a rhythm created by applying a razor blade to a mirror frame is played alongside a drum machine pattern, and they complement each other quite well. The programmed drums feel almost as metallic as the other percussion in a weird sort of way; the snare in particular sounds like an upturned bin, and its hollow sound really makes the actual metal being struck ring out across the studio, the artificiality of the samples just makes the real percussion being hit feel all the more impactful with something unreal to compare it to, it makes me picture the points of contact being hit as clearly as they’ve been recorded.
And I haven’t even gotten to Bargeld’s performance yet; it’s his most crazed showing on this record, shouting “Fütter Mein Ego” over and over again, which aside from the literal meaning could just as easily mean “buy more Neubauten albums, you sheep!” If that was the intention, Blixa, then it worked superbly on me, because I checked out the rest of their discography afterwards. There are obvious allusions to substance abuse, with the narrator drinking unhealthy amounts of vodka and consuming “Russian vitamins.” Exactly what those vitamins are, we may never know, but I speculate that this song might have been inspired by Bargeld working with Nick Cave, performing with
the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, and having to put up with Cave doing
all the heroin. If the song is in fact informed by Bargeld’s work with Cave, then he does a superb job convincing me that he’s having the worst possible trip; there’s one moment where he’s talking so fast that he runs out of breath, and there’s also that iconic scream which sounds like he’s inhaling and exhaling at the same time. While the song probably doesn’t strictly speaking deserve to be seven minutes long, the rhythm’s so goddamn infectious that I don’t care; truth be told, I actually listen to it on a semi-regular basis just for the rhythm section alone, it’s that catchy.
“Trinklied” (Drinking Song) is exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a drinking song. It’s easily the sparsest song the album has to offer; it’s just Bargeld singing bass while what sound like a bass drum and improvised cymbals are being struck in the background. Yeah, it’s probably just a kick drum, but the sound they get out of it is so thick and weighty that it sounds like it’s being played as it would in an orchestra, and it really lends the song a suitably drunken swagger. At first, this only seems to be a typical bender, but then the final verse happens, and it’s only made all the more unsettling by Bargeld’s performance, which is delivered in a strangled whisper:
“Aus Loches Schmutz kroch bös Getier
(From that pit’s filth crept foul beasties)
Und eh ichs mir recht beseh
(Which before I rightly knew)
Nagst weg darweil all Fleisch von mir
(Soon set gnawing all flesh from me)
Blieb nur der blanke Knochen stehen
(Leaving my few bones just standing there)
Now, that might just be nightmarish just for the sake of it, but I find it recontextualizes the entire song; what looked like a single night out gone wrong, in my opinion, was really just the most recent in a series of benders. In fact, I’m pretty sure the narrator is an addict, and the final verse is an extreme metaphor for alcohol poisoning and being quite literally consumed by his alcoholism.
“Z.N.S.” (C.N.S.) sounds like it should by rights be a dance track; it has an underlying hook, and it’s the most electronic song on the album, but it’s rather warped. Snapped fingers at least serve as a steady beat, but the rest of the music is twisted in an almost literal sense. The jerky and erratic rhythm makes me feel like I’m being buffeted by a gauntlet of drum machines, and its fits the subject matter rather well, about convulsions brought on by overstimulation, convulsions so severe that they may or may not kill the narrator, though the final lyrics sound very final to me:
“Sag Auf Wiedersehen zum aus Nervensystem”
(Say goodbye to the nervous system)
“Seele Brennt” (Soul Burns), which kicks off the second side, appears to be an inversion of sorts; where the first half opened with a dissonant, polyphonic assault, “Seele Brennt” is essentially negative space in audio form. Bargeld’s whispering is occasionally punctuated by drum rolls which sound thunderous in the overwhelming quietude, which makes the moments where the full band comes in all the more effective. Unusually for this album, such moments feature prominent grand piano and tubular bells, and Bargeld really sounds like his soul is burning, with a screech sustained for so long I’m amazed he’s still able to sing.
“Sehnsucht/Desire (Zitternd/Trembling)” is a song from their debut album
Kollaps given new life; the original was one of the quietest moments in an otherwise anarchic album, but the
Halber Mensch rendition is even more chaotic. There’s still a steady melody, but it’s surrounded by metallic clangor, with percussionists F. M. Einheit and N. U. Unruh doing their damnedest to sell desire as this destructive force. If nothing else, it’s a nice demonstration of where Neubauten were at during this point in their career; still loud and harsh in their sound, but also more adventurous in trying to write more structured songs. As an aside, this is also the closest Neubauten comes to sounding like something Nick Cave might have written; the erratic percussion almost feels like it could fit comfortably in the Birthday Party’s
Junkyard.
“Der Tod ist ein Dandy” (Death is a Dandy) is an excellent showcase of the noise side of Neubauten; the only parts resembling music in the strictly traditional sense is Mark Chung playing a stiff bassline and a rhythm courtesy of Einheit, and indeed Chung, Einheit, and Bargeld are the only rhythmic aspects in the din. I’m not sure what they used to create this song, but if their Rockpalast performance is anything to go by, I think I can safely assume that whatever Unruh’s playing are either abnormally large biscuit joiners or machinery that once contained circular saws. Eventually all these sounds come together, and there are so many that the noise comes right back around to being music, creating a sustained tone that is obviously music, but still strident because of what they’re using to get those results. It feels apocalyptic in its scale, and how it envelops the listener with headphones or a really good stereo system.
Interestingly, the lyrics contain what I think is a callback to the first half; the first four songs had hedonistic undertones which again come up on this song. Apparently, what’s really important is that Death has great fashion sense, but what really struck me are the final lyrics, among the very few spoken in English: “This was made to end all parties. Bye bye.” These words are what I think connect the two halves. The first deals strongly in physical sensation; note how the choir in “Halber Mensch” repeatedly intone “Wir triggern deine Sinne”, or “we trigger your senses.” Much of it is also about substance abuse, and the second half is about decay, which leads me to my view of the album as a whole: I like to think
Halber Mensch is a concept album about addiction, and the dire consequences that can and possibly will happen if one becomes a slave to their vices, so I find it interesting how even in the narrator’s dying moments, assuming the song has a narrator to begin with, still sees life as one big party.
“Letztes Biest/Last Beast (Am Himmel/In the Sky)” is easily the prettiest song on the album, but I also find it to be the most hollow. Yes, it’s a nice closer, but weirdly, it hardly feels like a victory considering the subject matter and what it took to get here. Once again, there’s a narrator who appears to be experiencing his final moments, seeing himself as “the last beast in the sky”, and there’s a quiet desperation to Bargeld’s delivery which stands in stark contrast to the relative beauty of the music accompanying him, like whatever he’s experiencing might in fact be serene, but he doesn’t want to fade.
But fade he does, because that’s the end of the album, at least if you want it to be. The reissue has some extras, including a redundant “Yü-gung” remix and an admittedly great cover of
Lee Hazlewood’s “Sand”, but the one addition I think worth keeping is “Das Schaben”, because it’s the only one that’s truly in keeping with the rest of the album proper, and it’s a chilling epilogue to an album that was already prime nightmare fuel material. The title translates to either “The Scraping” or “The Rasping”; despite having recently studied German, I’m not knowledgeable or fluent enough in the language to say which is strictly speaking correct, but both are quite apt considering what ensues. This is without contest the most experimental cut on the record; it’s not really a song so much as, for lack of better words, a variety of sounds. “Scraping” is accurate because there’s quite a lot of that going on; there’s a lot of grinding noises, metal being scraped against metal. I can also hear a lot of power tools being operated: circular saws, drills, as well as guitar and amplifer feedback and Bargeld whistling into a megaphone. I’d also hazard a guess that biscuit joiners and belt sanders are somewhere in the mix as well.
All of this together creates a cluster of noise which sounds like rasping, like a great machine has been given life and is taking its first breaths trying to clear its congestion. Perhaps this is just because of my love of ambient music, but after a while, it takes on a sort of drone quality which I can get lost in. It functions well as an alternate closer too, in my opinion; it’s one last trip through the industrial hell that Neubauten has created, and it has a disquieting air of finality about it. It feels like the world is ending, and honestly it could just as easily accompany the heat death of the universe as well. If the lyrics of “Letztes Biest” are to be taken literally, I also like to envision a living factory growing and expanding like a cancer upon the earth, swallowing a countryside with industry, eating animals and plant life and expelling the resultant smoke and slag until there’s nothing left, and eventually belching enough fumes and pollutants into the atmosphere that nothing can grow or live on the planet anymore. Blimey, that was bleak, even for this album.
And that is
Halber Mensch. I already loved this album at first site, but now it’s easily my favourite industrial record. Alongside the first two Neubauten albums,
Halber Mensch is probably the purest manifestation of industrial music as an idea, taking discarded tools and junk and giving it new purpose and using machinery to enhance their music and imagery. Not sure if I can say the same about it being the purest
form of industrial music, but it’s certainly the most literal I’ve yet come across for the same reasons. Another significant reason this album made such an impression on me and continues to is because of its atmosphere; few other Neubauten albums, in my opinion, have a similar sense of creeping dread and impending doom and maintain it for their entire duration, but it’s something
Halber Mensch has in spades and actively sustains, and I love it for that. Lastly, there’s a sort of thematic consistency to it that I find elevates it above the rest of the Neubauten discography, not that I mean to discredit the rest of their body of work, because it’s remarkably consistent. I’d like to stress that it’s not actually a concept album; sure, there might be recurring themes, but there’s much less of a narrative to it than this review might lead you to believe. There’s certainly a story I can clearly see play out in my mind’s eye when I listen to this album, but I’d rather not give details because a) I’d rather not make it sound like a first draft of
The Downward Spiral by
Nine Inch Nails, at least not more than I already have, and b) I strongly encourage you to listen to this album, and regard this review as the ramblings of a fangirl with an overactive imagination. Still, I wouldn’t have written so much about
Halber Mensch if it didn’t so strongly stimulate my imagination, and it did, because it’s a terrific work of art with consistently creative rhythms and lyrics, and to quote Yahtzee Croshaw, “it's just damn good. Damn damn good good damn good damn damn... good.”
Favourite tracks: "Das Schaben", "Yü-gung", "Der Tod ist ein Dandy", "Halber Mensch", "Letztes Biest"
Least Favourite: "Seele Brennt", if I had to choose one.
