Rammstein has been a subscriber to the Charts-Eins for 25 years, and this time the Berliners are statistically delivering the “most successful album of 2022”: “Zeit” was at the top for five weeks in Germany alone, 19 in the top ten, so far there have been over 440,000 Units sold, 160,000 in the first week alone. If something new from Rammstein is announced, in addition to the fascination with gigantomania, even the blackest metal press will discover their penchant for the rainbow. It makes sense that you should question the retro-futuristic building photographed by Bryan Adams on the cover. The “Trudelturm” in Berlin, as a historically not entirely unencumbered scientific monument, actually gives one or the other metaphorical access to the ambiguous pyrorockers. But that every line of text is excitedly trying to be interpreted as a separation indicator or other gossip is strange.
There is enough to discover artistically in the guise of the usual hit-and-run 4/4 time. Similar to the cover, the many 80s science fiction keyboards also move into a dreary in-between time that smells of the dystopian present. Of course, Till Lindemann still reliably writes and sings in Fraktur, but the ability for melody and poetic aestheticization is increasing. In some songs it’s a bit more solemn, the metallic industrial riffs sometimes dissolve almost spherically into Gothrock darkness. Lyrically they throw something obtrusively sexual around again, but of course there is always room for interpretation and increasingly irony. In addition to all sorts of brutal philosophical things about transience and death (do they stop?), German bourgeois and concerned citizens in particular get something in front of the prosperity bu on “Zeit”.
Our annual charts were put together by the music critics of the “Freie Presse”. You can find all previous placements HERE.
www.freiepresse.de/alben22