Kernkrach Germany Vinyl & CDs

Review: After years of reluctance, finally a new album from Dada Pogrom. The Icelandic musician Kenneth Walter Balys here crafts a sonic-alchemical opus out of the prima materia that are pop harmony and strutting synths; elaborated synth passages and wonderful pop melodies. After the mystery musician played some of these new songs in front of a full sold out house at the Kernkrach Festival, The Black Light Spectrum follows as the recorded-musical encore demanded by the audience that never received one in live form. Through 12/8 marches, mellotronic/flutey surrealisms ('Forsaken'), hoovering electro-saw tricks ('Taste The Wip') and a banger-bound latter half, Dada Pogrom dazzles us once more.

Review: Silent EM has never been silent. The one-man coldwave act formed in early-2010s NYC by one Jean Lorenzo is a raucous sound-maker, and his new sonic octant Real Life is yet another vampophony. This one follows 2019's industrial darkwave brooder 'The Absence', which had a more modernistic, skeletal sound. Real Life sounds reconstituted and denser by comparison, like Dracula stood upright, wiping his phizog after a fresh cadaver. In fact, Lorenzo's feeling so sanguine, he's willing to explore new genre fusions, with the exemplary 'Versions Of Hell' mixing post-punk and hardcore donk, and 'Survive' sounding like Sisters Of Mercy remake the Dark City theme tune. Batwinged banger 'Europa' flies at peak velocity, and in our opnion is the catchiest track, topping its hook off with an ashen white vocal line from fellow artist Xarah Dion.

Review: Formed in 2005 between Keen K (Divider), Dirk-Torben Klein (Echo West, Silent Signals, Flashbacks) and Niclas Bruckner, Trans Active Nightzone are a fin de millenaire coldwave and synthpop act, whose interest in said sounds came at just the right time: not too early to be mere products of their time, and not too late to become glossy pastiches either. Influenced heavily by Joy Division, Killing Joke and They Might Be Giants, as well as early 80s minimal wave and adjacent synthpop offshoots, their self-titled record was an infectious indulgence of modern production techniques welded to an established style, suturing a crisp but no less bulbous sound. The surreality of their music is best heard on 'In Dreams', whose piquant twang-leads and demure choruses conjure first-person visions of reeling through an impossible dream-metropolis, and 'Logical & Interfered', where things grow much graver and obscener, as the vocalists work together as certain lyrical accomplices to indict the future system of heinous retroactive crimes against humanity.