The feeling didn't last, but three tracks into Neu! 2, I was all set to declare it the duo’s best album. It felt like a mature evolution from the debut, and more cohesive than the split-personality third album. Opener “Für Immer” might be the best encapsulation of what people think of when they say something “sounds like Neu”: the hypnotic beat, the droning guitars, the crisp production. I halfway expected Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadler to start chanting along midway through. The song segues into “Spitzenqualitat,” with Klaus Dinger’s signature drum beat covered in echo as if it were the Jesus & Mary Chain remix. The beat gradually slows down; you get the feeling that the word “motorik” might have been coined during this very track, as it sounds literally as if the beat is powering down into sleep mode.
Speed, in the sense of revolutions per minute, seems to be the primary theme of Neu! 2. The album is most famous for its filler: the story goes that Dinger and Michael Rother had run out of money during their session, so they simply filled with second half of their album with versions of “Super” and “Neuschnee” played at various speeds. Essentially the same thing as putting a 33 record on 78, or simultaneously holding down the fast-forward and play buttons on your tape deck. The story sounds suspicious to me; after all, Neu! and Neu! 75 are each just six songs long. Why did Neu! 2 need to be twice that? Dinger and Rother must have had a better reason for the songs’ inclusion than a need for padding. Was it merely a joke on their fans? Did such manipulations feel experimental circa 1973? (They weren’t terribly: Les Paul was doing more interesting innovations with tape speeds back in the 1940s.)
This extended RPM-fiddling ultimately keeps Neu! 2 from being a wholly satisfying record. But I will grant that there is something interesting going on here. The arc of “Neuschnee 78”–“Super 16”–“Neuschnee” (the numerals indicate the RPM speed; no numeral means it’s regular speed) accomplishes with speed what Josef Albers does with color—you start to lose sense of what’s too fast, what’s too slow, and what’s normal, the same way Albers can make you think you’re looking at two different shades of red just by pairing the color with contrasting or complementary hues. The cartoonishly fast “Neuschnee 78” and the agonizingly slow “Super 16” knock your ears out of whack; when the unmanipulated “Neuschnee” begins, it too sounds “wrong.” Your perception of standard speed becomes so warped that everything feels off. The same happens again with “Casetto,” which sounds like a warped record dialed down to 16 RPMs, punctuated with sudden stops and restarts before jumping at last into the hyperspeed “Super 78” and slowing down again with “Hallo Excentrico.” By the time of album closer “Super”—a track you’ve already heard twice by now, once too fast and once too slow—it just sounds… weird.
So it’s an interesting experiment. But it’s not very fun to listen to straight through more than once or twice. Better to trim it to seven tracks (I admit I like the strange “Cassetto,” speed be damned):
- Für Immer
- Spitzenqualitat
- Gedenkminute
- Lila Engel
- Neuschnee
- Cassetto
- Super
Comments