Die Warzau - Convenience
I've made no bones about the fact that Die Warzau's Engine is the standard by which I compare most records (both in texture and execution). Since I am unabashedly biased about their work, I don't believe that I can be critically objective about their music since it continually thrills me with its attention to sonic density and its immaculate production. Frankly, I thought it would never be an issue, really. Van Christie and Jim Marcus -- the duo at the center of Die Warzau -- broke up over a half decade ago, and moved on to other projects. I had Engine and, if that was it, it was good enough.
And yet, here's a copy of Convenience on my desk. I bought it the day it came out, thinking that if I paid for it I would be absolved from the tyranny of having to make words about it. I came to the record as a pure consumer and I could just be a happy listener. And then the package from Pulseblack arrives. Inside is a review copy of Convenience, Die Warzau's follow-up to Engine, and hiding beneath the CD was the subtle goading undercurrent of my own guilt and ego: come on, have you got what it takes?
Maybe that's what brought them back. Maybe they looked down the line and judged themselves by the last thing they left behind and thought, "Maybe that's not enough." Maybe where we were yesterday isn't enough for today, and maybe we want something better for tomorrow. Maybe "All Good Girls" needs a proper answer. And, in the end, maybe silence is the same thing as dying and some of us aren't ready to go just yet.
So, Convenience, the new record by Die Warzau. It is, simply, an industrial pop political statement, a sonic sermon on the horror of being devoured by the machinery of our own mindless commercialization as we are subjected to the dictatorship of malignant self-servicing and corporate toadying. It is a bruised draught of vitriol that slips under our numbness and burns all the tender linings we thought we had hidden away from the world. It is, beneath its caustic veneer and hook-laden indictment of the current disarray of our culture, the light in the wilderness that is a beacon for our still possible ascendence and triumph over mediocrity and terror. It may be convenient to turn a blind eye to the hypocrisy on the television screen. "Fall asleep and stay that way / Valium or a different way," they muse on "Linoleum." But Die Warzau asks: Is this enough? Is this the way we want to be remembered?
The subversive delight of Die Warzau lies in how they make pop songs out of barbed political commentary and arrhythmic noises. "Radiation Babies," the track which showed up on Positron Records' Komposi002 compilation last year, hums with a thick bassline and a rousing chorus that sinks itself into the base of your throat. It's the sort of catchy pop song that effortlessly finds its way into the idle moments of verbal expression when you are caught in traffic, trapped in elevators and stuck in lines. It's only later when you choke on the lyrics that you realize just how much sugar has been layered on top of these bilious words. "I'm gonna love you like you're someone else, like you're somebody else / While you're bombing radiation babies into the ground." Van Christie's saxophone engages in a Peter Brotzmann-esque skronk-out with the fuzz guitar for the final verse of the track, a detonation of chaos that dissolves the saccharine sweetness of the pop lick and reveals the underlying frustration and pain of the narrative voice. "You can fight it but we know it that you never won / You took it then you ran and then we woke up."
"Glare," a reminder of our culpability through silence, contrasts the narrator's confusion as to his seemingly isolated awareness of our national insanity with the relentless parade of death and blood that confronts him every day on the television. "Who builds the mines that shatter / Children's arms and what does it matter / We focus on the now, remind ourselves we are right." "Linoleum" spirals around the despair of the single man with just one vote. Does he count? Does he even dare to second-guess the weighty choices laid upon our leaders? "It all feels like fear to me," Jim Marcus sings.
Art is based on three impulses: the fear of the unknown, the despair of the now, and the aspiration for some sort of cultural and biological evolution. Die Warzau are the rare band that addresses all three of these impulses through their music. Driven by visceral reactions to the current political climate in the United States, Marcus and Christie have rediscovered a need for Die Warzau's potent brand of brazen energy. There arre still songs to be found in the belly of the machine; there are still protest songs to be built from the hiss of the television's dying signal, the looped contortion of the political sound byte, the rhythmic pulse of our industrial society, and the distorted wail of our evolutionary degradation. "We are not men, we are machines that take the breath of life away / We are not men, we are pathetic animals who kill to kill / We are not sane, we are colluding with the enemy is us / We are not sane, we are destroying things we are unfit to touch."
In the end, it is "Shine" that guides us. A response to "All Good Girls," Engine's disturbing pop song, "Shine" is all about asking for redemption, about asking for another chance at salvation -- even for the debased and unworthy.
"How do I even say I love you
Soft enough to be heard
Sound asleep and yet I imagine
You understand every word
And if I were to shine shine shine
Every light every ray would be you
And if I were to rule the world
I'd throw it all away for one of your smiles."
It's not the flower child answer of "Love will guide us." It is the pure exhortation that we don't have to live in fear and that fear isn't the only emotion that can guide us. The chorus of "Come As You Are" reminds us: "Near the end as we are / We can be superstars." Indeed. Welcome back, Jim and Van. May we all be worthy.
Die Warzau
Pulseblack [2005]
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