Das Kinn, Bureau B’s new signing, feels like a bold new discovery even if he’s in his mid-40s. Hamburg’s experimental imprint finds itself in the unusual position of being one of the most consistently interesting labels on the planet whilst also fielding a roster of artists of a certain vintage such as Karl Bartos, Peter Baumann, Faust and Martin Rev. Fresher blood about the place augurs well, but don’t expect sunshine and roses. Ruinenkampf serves as a millennial cri-de-coeur, expounding upon how broken everything is.
Das Kinn arrives to the slow, steady beep beep beep of ‘Jamais Vu’. It’s a ballad of solemnity, originally recorded by 80s Berlin tape underground outfit Teurer Denn Je, and it reverses in like an articulated bus, warning us to get out of the way. The artist uses this cover and his doleful vox to introduce himself in dramatic fashion. Das Kinn wasn’t born in a vacuum, of course. Frankfurter Toben Piel is a former geriatric nurse turned musical autodidact who makes music for theatres. He’s also one half of the mercurial electronic band Les Trucs with his accomplice Charlotte Simon. Das Kinn feels a long way from that group’s strong visual, hyperkinetic energy, even if many of the songs here are muscular and confrontational too.
Piel apparently was inspired to create this project whilst visiting cemeteries, where he would find detached perspective in the peaceful milieu of the headstones. What he’s come up with is as much influenced by the Neue Deutsche Welle as it is Kurt Weill, a welcome smearing together of street walking grime and board treading greasepaint, especially on the fierce ‘Oneironaut sei wachsam’. Underpinning it is a DAF-like moxie, with Piel delivering a powerful staccato holler that is oddly reminiscent of Buster Bloodvessel or Alexei Sayle channeling Mussolini. It’s brutally anthemic too, and at times redolent of The Stranglers, if only they had discovered EBM.
Relief comes in the shape of ‘Souterrain’, a brief foray into ambient noise and sustenant synths, with an unexpected sax break at the end of the tunnel. Then we’re back to impossible angles and flailing elbows, scratching back in the new wave dirt of ‘Die Ratten’ as Piel hollers in German over a convulsing electronic bass sequence: “The rats seek their captor / They seek and find salvation in the Volksempfänger” referring to Joseph Goebbels dissemination of propaganda through cheap radios in the 1930s while no doubt alluding to modern examples of the exploitation of power (you don’t have to think too hard to come up with an equivalent). And ‘Tempel des Todes’, with its slow, arpeggiated build and Toben Piel’s forlorn howl is heartbreaking, even if you have no idea what he’s singing about. One for the future then, among a roster of time-tested legends.
