Messer - Kratermusik (2024)

Where there is a crater, there must have been an incident. Something has hit or broken out where there is now peace. In 2012, Messer's feverish debut "Im Vertigo" spun into the simmering enthusiasm for punk from Germany and grew into a defining voice in the post-punk revival of the 1900s. What was still rampant on the last two records “Jalousie” (2016) and “No Future Days” (2020) is now more prominent on “Kratermusik” and at the same time provides security for further expeditions. The individual idea is now more clearly defined than before, Crater Music is an album in the literal sense: Each page has a different image, a different scene with different figures, held together by a cover, a world of motifs, a sound that this time is dense but all the more detailed. Elsewhere, voices dissolve: Pola Lia Levy, who has been a close friend of the band for a long time and is currently in the starting blocks with her new band Dews, donates harmonies that are present in the initially gentle, then increasingly rousing "In the False Dream". blurred into the rest of the band. In the space dub finale "At the End of a Great Confusion" she joins in a spirited sing-song with Joachim Franz Büchner. What sounds comforting here seems torn apart in the multi-voiced mirror, although not necessarily scary - but just as fascinating and ambivalent as Mille Petrozza from the legendary thrash metal band Kreator, who with a few English-language lines through the whispering chorus at the end of the wave epitaph Grabeland may cut. So knives remain ambivalent, questioning and searching, especially when it comes to war and peace or the future of the planet. The movement is already in the title: The "knife-related word" crater, according to Otremba, "is ambiguous, a word that makes it clear: you have to stick to it. It's a sharp-edged, harsh word." There is always the potential for an explosion in the crater; in peace the next war lurks. In terms of aesthetics, the new record is a typical Messer album, even in its usual transgression of what post-punk can be. This band has never sounded more diverse, their reference system remains inscrutable. At the same time, the pop tides are washing up another (New) New German Wave, but Messer remains committed to their own cycles and is in constant transition: metaphors never completely dissolve, motifs are always illuminated in a new way, sounds relate to one another in a different way.