A post-industrial rock band draw on folk, heavy metal and classical music - much of it bacon sliced through an early sampler - while covering the songs of innovative socialist composer Kurt Weill in German and English. I guess 'Play Kurt Weill' was never going to be The Young Gods' breakthrough record.
Coming from Switzerland, it probably all made perfect sense to the band themselves. Their homeland has a long history of folk and classical music, and when they started out in 1985 metal bands such as Krokus, Celtic Frost and Hellhammer represented the country's most recent musical exports.
Taking a more new wave-orientated approach, The Young Gods rejected guitars in favour of the sampler and just as Switzerland has no unifying language, with French, German and Italian all commonly spoken, they decided to mix it up when it came to their lyrics.
Despite being associated with the post-industrial genre best known for coruscating, brutal sounds welded to fierce rhythms, and having lifted their name from a song on the Swans' charmingly titled Raping A Slave EP, The Young Gods thankfully infused their music with a sly sense of humour - as highlighted by the cover of Gary Glitter's Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again (retitled Did You Miss Me) from their 1987 debut album.
Play Kurt Weill was the band's third album, which appeared two years after they had performed the songs on stage at a tribute concert held in Switzerland.
The belated decision to record them seems to have resulted from original keyboardist Cesare Pizzi's decision to quit the band in favour of a job in IT in the wake of second album L'Eau Rouge. Given the richly ferocious weirdness of the band Pizzi had created with gravelly vocalist Franz Treichler, this unlikely career switch must rate up their with James Williamson abandoning Iggy Pop to design computer chips.
When Pizzi quit in 1989 he was replaced by the band's sound engineer, Alain Monod, but having created much of the band's sound to date, songwriting seemingly ground to a halt.
Play Kurt Weill is a stop-gap album in truth while the band work out how to write songs together and sounds like the end of the Pizzi era rather than the beginning of a new one. On the MySpace site for the Ludan Dross alias he occasionally performs under, Pizzi claims he was 'present' on the first three Young Gods albums, though he had been out of the band for two years by the time Plays... was released.
Presumably Pizzi was heavily involved in arranging the songs for the original concert but the only mention he gets on the album itself is in the 'Thanks to' section on the inner sleeve, where he appears 18th on a list of 19 people. It seems safe to say he and Treichler weren't on the friendliest of terms at that stage.
However, that doesn't stop them from taking a hammer to the melody and meter of the songs, conjuring up their own arrangements that restore the darkness to the likes of Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) and Swing Low, which have been covered a thousand times in a swinging jazz fashion, losing much of the true meaning along the way.
Side one begins with a run of three songs from The Threepenny Opera, starting with Prologue which Weill and Brecht had themselves adapted from John Gay's 1728 work, The Beggar's Opera, and Treichler barks out through a megaphone over ominous drones and samples of crowds booing and cheering.
Salomon Song starts with a fairground organ and Treichler rolling his Rs as he sings in German about the prostitute Jenny's rejection of mankind's lust for glory before the chorus bounces in full of cavernous bass and swirling orchestral samples.
Macker Messer chops up hard rock samples into strange shapes before charging into the chorus on the back of a double bass drum kick. You couldn't further from Louie Armstrong's take on the song - this shark really is baring his teeth.
Speak Low, which comes from Weill's time on Broadway, is mutated into towering twisted techno, Treichler switching to English to deliver the lyric with real pathos. The moment when he moans 'Tomorrow is near/ tomorrow is here/ always too soon' before a massive landslide of sound overwhelms you both reinvents the song and cuts it back to its original core at the same time.
Side two starts with Alabama Song, best known by many from The Doors' cover on their debut album. Jim Morrison made it sound like a night on the town in search of whiskey and women but The Young Gods take it to a darker place, filled with addiction and desperation rather than fun.
The music is transformed into a strange, sickly oompah waltz and when Treichler growls 'Show me the way to the next little girl' as a roll of thunder looms through the speakers you want to alert the authorities immediately. The chorus eventually arrives nearly two and a half minutes in as Treichler howls at the Alabama Moon about blotting about his pain with drink and women.
Seerauber Jenny marks a return to The Threepenny Opera and German lyrics, with the disillusioned heroine dreaming of a warship sailing into harbour to obliterate all her oppressors. The band pull out all the stops for this one, starting with another strange oompah waltz that disintegrates into explosions before military drums, a plucked bass, a spidery violin and mournful horns soundtrack the destruction.
Overture is an unexpectedly laidback instrumental, with sitar and tablas entwining with slow drones to leave the listener slightly non-plussed but pleased nontheless.
Finally, September Song maintains the mellow mood with Treichler capturing the loss and regret beautifully. Following in the footsteps of Bing Crosby and Lou Reed, among many others, isn't easy but the autumnal vibe rounds off the album nicely.
Needless to say, Plays Kurt Weill didn't sell by the bucketload and The Young Gods moved in a more commercial direction for their next LP, 1992's TV Sky, which smoothed off some of their more interesting edges but won them a US audience.
The band are still going today, having experimented with orchestras, ambient and even acoustic guitars along the way, but The Young Gods Play Kurt Weill remains an underappreciated gem in their back catalogue. By the way, is it just me or does Kurt Weill really look like Roy 'Chubby' Brown?
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