Review Summary: Great conservative EBM, which isn’t surprising….
SHORT REVIEW
The conservatism of Robo Sapien Race is not surprising because Die Robo Sapiens is a side-project of the members of
Die Krupps, who helped found the genre during the early 1980’s. Robo Sapien Race is an old-school EBM album produced on modern synths with a few modern effects. Though sharing its synthesizers with 1980’s Synthpop, early 80's EBM shared its roots with the Punk and “true” Industrial bands of that time. Fans of bands like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb will appreciate its resemblance to 1980’s EBM as contrasted with the varieties of “EBM” today. Non-fans might experience this album as a slightly darker, “harder” variety of Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell. You’ll just have to give it a whirl and see.
The name and theme of the album seems to be science-fiction oriented, as in “the Elvish races, the Dwarvish races, the race of Men, and the race of Robo Sapiens.”
Some tracks:
Automatenland.
Straight-up EBM
Transrapid Rapid.
Straight-up EBM
Niemals Stillstehen.
This track adds the synthesizer sound called “orchestra hit” inherited from the techno of the 1990’s that didn’t exist in the 1980’s, giving it a harsh-EBM/Aggrotech flavor.
Robo Sapein.
This is a conservative remix of the more metallic version on Die Krupps’ 2013 album Machinists of Joy. It’s interesting for comparison, but I prefer the guitars and orchestra on the original.
AD NAUSEUM REVIEW
Sound -- Critics POV
Die Krupps, currently an Industrial-Metal band of the Rammstein/KMFDM flavor, has rarely if ever produced a song without synthesizers, but on Robo Sapien Race there is a notable absence of guitars. It’s not the synthesizers that stand-out, though, it’s the old-school tone-colors of the sounds they used to produce the album. For example the effects in the song "Robotimierung" on this album sound very like Front 242’s “Geography II", released in 1982. On "Automatenland" they did not carefully process and layer the vocals as is common today in the genre - they just ran them straight through a vocoder, yielding a sound almost exactly like “Mr. Roboto.”
Fans like me occasionally encounter hostility to this kind of aggressive cyborg, in-your-face-electronic music making. “That’s not music” they might say. I had a (now deceased, R.I.P) friend once, an AC/DC and Hendrix-devoted Rock fan, who ran a karaoke business. At a party of his I sang -- or rather croaked -- Rammstein’s Du Hast (German is surprisingly easy to fake if no one in the audience speaks it). Du Hast was a relatively new song back then, and when it got to the interlude where Lorenz on the synthesizers has a solo my friend yelled at me over the music “Christ alive, it sounds like my God-damned cell phone!” On another encounter, I ran across a hilarious comment about a Funker Vogt album by a Sputnik user that ran something like “wacko Speak and Spell gizmo sh1t. What is this, R2D2? What the hell?” A little trollish, but probably spot-on if your musical tastes are rooted in traditional “real” instruments like violins or guitars. And it’s very possible that the music on Robo Sapien Race REALLY DOES sound like Depeche Mode’s first album to a non-fan even though, to Industrial fans, they are obviously different.
I wish we could all agree that EBM really IS MUSIC. But some simply CAN'T agree because how CAN they take it seriously when it sounds like the squeals and clicks of a band of astro-droids?
Sound -- Fanbase POV
But if you’re an EBM fan these electronic instruments work like a high voltage turbine to drive emotion, just like all music. I speculate that the fanbase can be divided into two groups with respect to how they experience synthesizers: Either you enjoy the sounds for their tone-color, as does for example Rudy Ratzinger of Wumpscut, or like me you don’t really notice the tone-colors of any sounds in any music, mostly just paying attention to its usual qualities: Melody, harmony and rhythm. To my ears the sounds from the synthesizers on Robo Sapien Race are just harsher varieties of “real” instruments, of more-or-less respectable instruments like violins or bassoons or – it must be admitted – kazoos.
Believe it or not, Mozart’s and Die Robo Sapiens’ music shares the same pitches, harmonies and rhythms. For all the complexity of his music, Mozart’s rhythms are LUDICROUSLY repetitive to the ear of a jazz musician, with very little syncopation, as bland as a techno beat is to a death-metal drummer. Of course if you think Mozart sucks then the argument is meaningless. But I tried.
Aesthetics
Much of the attitude and overall aesthetic of EBM and “true” Industrial bands were influenced by, or were at least related to, early punk. Not the Green Day “let’s party and have a great time” variety, which came later, but the “YOU DON’T LIKE IT? WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT!!?” variety of the Sex Pistols. In this latter spirit, EBM musicians treated their abrasive synthesizers as a kind of “wall of sound” alternative to guitars.
These EBM artists strike me as possibly a little nerdier and less dangerous than The Exploited variety -- certainly from what I've read their shows APPEAR to have been less dangerous -- but they shared a similar approach to music-making: Use what you’ve got. In a world where exploitation is rife, and where expensive private music lessons are out of reach, or not respected, early punks expressed how they felt with the resources that were available. They were able to make great music using only bare interval harmonies beneath angry vocals and rhythms, using cheap but perfectly functional guitars and drums, and producing records from cheap but perfectly functional equipment.
The minimalistic aesthetic of the punks and other artists of that era had wide influence lasting up to today; it’s reflected in most genres. Outside of Industrial, for instance, I recently read a review of the metal band
Darkthrone, where Sputnik Emeritus Brandon Scott poetically captured the austere beauty of a minimalist aesthetic. Darkthrone’s music is hard, but not less beautiful than any other music. Writing of the album
Under a Funeral Moon he wrote:
"The rigid minimalism the album ascribes to is drenched in lunar mysticism; even the most barren landscapes look divine in the moonlight."
A comparable rigid minimalism, a pursuit of creating barren and moonlit soundscapes, was taken to almost obsessive extremes by what are called -- by purists -- the “true” Industrial bands, bands like
Throbbing Gristle and
Einsturzende Neubauten. The talent of these artists rested in their abilities to use pretty much anything laying around as a musical instrument. It was like “alright, we’ve got some pots and pans, a comb, some rubber bands and a butter knife. Fcuk yeah! LET’S MAKE SOME NOISE!”
Sputnik Staff Reviewer Simon K., and recently Sputnik user SpiridonOrlovschi, have both written eloquently in their reviews on the powerful emotions that for example Throbbing Gristle’s
The Second Annual Report can evoke with very basic resources, with very little in the way of what is usually called “music” (although it sounds like Throbbing Gristle's resources were more complicated than rubber bands).
Though it evolved in parallel and shared its electro sound (at least to the ears of non-fans) with Synthpop, EBM emerged from “true” Industrialists like Throbbing Gristle and their peers, borrowing the minimalist aesthetic but sculpting it into a more “musical” variety by adapting the stark harmonies and regular beats of punk. I’m generalizing wildly here and it doesn't describe all EBM bands, but our album under discussion, Robo Sapien Race, sounds to me like a throw-back to this early emergence of the genre, around the time of Die Krupps’ 1982 album
Volle Kraft Voraus!. It was a time before EBM started hybridizing with the guitaristic, percussive and vocal elements from metal on the one side of the “hardness” spectrum, and from the lush harmonies and melodies and softer vocals of synthpop on the other. Comparing the two albums -- Robo Sapien Race and Volle Kraft Voraus! -- you might be fooled into believing they were released only fourteen years apart instead of four decades.
Throw-Backs and Subgenres
It occurred to me while writing and researching this that EBM doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s golden age was around maybe 1987, and by the 1990’s it had evolved into different strains of Industrial (BTW purists would call EBM and everything else “Post” Industrial). By 2003 many of the original bands had broken up, including Die Krupps.
Today, if I peruse a Spotify playlist called “EBM,” I’ll get a list of songs that range from VNV Nation -- which today is a kind of “hard” variety of Synthpop -- to songs like “Loyal to my Hate” by Wumpscut. This last one is a killer song alright, but to my ears it’s a thoroughly Electro-Industrial example of the Front Line Assembly flavor of the genre, and distinct from the music on our album, Robo Sapien Race.
But this is nit-picking. The genre gets the attention of all kinds of obsessive nit-pickers like me on Wikipedia, where a casual reader might think there is agreement on all the subgenres of Industrial; that Aggrotech, Harsh-EBM, Hellektro, Dark-Electro, Gothic-Electro and Darkwave all have distinct characteristics. But they don’t; or at least their boundaries are fuzzy. Sputnikmusic is right to settle the matter by simply calling all of it “Industrial.” EBM elements are common to all of these, however, and today the word seems to be used to point to out that a given song has inherited some elements from EBM - e.g. martial drum beats and sequenced rhythmic basslines. EXCEPT FOR OUR ALBUM, "Robo Sapien Race, which REALLY IS very close to a “pure” form of the old genre.
On the Rating
This was a hard album to rate because it’s new to me. It was Sputnik “great” going through it, but I don’t know how much of it will stick. My analytical mind, the mind that Sputniks use to criticize music, works fine enough, but my so-called reptilian mind, the deep part that governs love and hate and beauty, is slow to integrate new music; slower than a reptile’s metabolism. More like the metabolism of an amphibian, like a salamander’s.
But I can say as an EBM fan that Robo Sapiens Race is a thoroughly enjoyable example of the pioneering and little-known music that emerged when Industrial was becoming a genre, by a modern band that was actually a part of it when it happened. At very the least, it’s a great trip through history.
I made a list containing the best Classic EBM albums of the era, as voted by the Sputnik EBM-loving community. The list is not really my opinion but the results of Sputnik’s statistical rating system: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/list.php?listid=201491&memberid=1123708
