Whatever else Alexander Hacke might have done in producing the record, stopping the band and saying “No, I think that’s a bit much” doesn’t appear to have been part of it. And as is pretty much always the case, that’s all to the good.
Whatever else Alexander Hacke might have done in producing the record, stopping the band and saying “No, I think that’s a bit much” doesn’t appear to have been part of it. And as is pretty much always the case, that’s all to the good.
As a general rule you should always be wary when a band’s publicity starts lauding the producer. Too often you get a nicely buffed turd or a pale facsimile of the producer’s own finest hour. Fortunately, despite giving significant deskroom to Neubatenmeister Alexander Hacke, Italy’s Aedi suffer no such problems.
Neither will you get a sense of the whole of Ha Ta Ka Pa from its opening –a muted 30 second feedback tone morphing into a bit of Sabs riffery. Nor from any other snippet that you lift at random. While a decent guitar thunder is a recurring theme, it’s sparingly used and the aforementioned riff is quickly elbowed to the background by discordant piano, organ and apparently classically trained vocals into a fabulous psychedelic mess. Drop into the record anywhere else and it will often trip another sound-a-like. Fall on Rabbit in the Road kicking off into shouty wonderment and you might think Whale (er, well, if you’re quite old with a good memory for unlikely hit singles you might…). Wander in at Fohn (including as it drifts into Nero) and you might think they were trying genetically to re-splice Brakes’ rough energy with British Sea Power’s more elegiac moments. But none of these impressions dwells too long and it’s massively unlikely any of these are influences being traded on. It’s just that if you put together such a massively energetic and wide-ranging record as Aedi have done here, you’re bound to end up calling to mind someone quite often (and when they do, it’s always someone good). It’s got the sort of lunatic, free-wheeling ambition that makes it joy to listen to, and to this mind at least, a suitably terrific companion to Trembling Bells’ sprawlingly fun The Marble Downs from last year. Aedi make room for some stately Bellsian beauty as well as their chaotic, barely controlled folk noise, but what they’ve produced is all their own.
Whatever else Alexander Hacke might have done in producing the record, stopping the band and saying “No, I think that’s a bit much” doesn’t appear to have been part of it. And as is pretty much always the case, that’s all to the good.