Februrary Record Club, Neu!, "Neu! 2"

It's a solid album, though perhaps the least solid of their triumphant trio (I prefer Neu! 75 by quite a wide margin). I understand they ran out of money while recording it and had to patch it together, which is why there are some sped-up things on it and a general sense of unevenness and things missing.
Still good; I prefer them to Kraftwerk and Can, if we're talking Germans.

I sort of vaguely knew, but never bothered to look into the fourth one, dunno why.

An old favorite, though I personally think Neu! never topped the first album. Given my love of Krautrock, I really should take a music-themed trip to Berlin, Cologne, and elsewhere one of these days. Though Michael Rother's solo albums largely left me cold, I'm also a fan of Klaus Dinger's post-Neu! project La Dusseldorf.

While Dinger is rightfully heralded for the "motorik" beat sound, I think there are interesting antecedents to it. In particular, Mo Tucker's drumming on some VU tracks sounds like an influence to me.

Credit also should be given to producer Conny Plank, who arguably brought the first instances of "remixing" to rock music with this record.

Anyway, great choice, Record Club. 
 

I absolutely fucking love this album. I love it from start to finish, head to toe, up and down and will never ever get tired of listening to it. It's an awesome Record Club choice - top marks to Nudeviking.

What I love about it is just how frugal the deployment of actual music is. That's true on so many tracks, but something like the ever-awesome "Lila Engel" stands firm comparison with the likes of The Stooges in terms of its structure, the guttural vocals and the unpolished guitar work. It's very crude but it's blisteringly effective and the very scaled down sound is what adds to its power, rather than taking something away - it's an absolutely phenomenal song. "Fur Immer" is one of those perfect, sprawling Krautrock songs that's literally note-perfect, eleven minutes of just startlingly great music. I guess the most obvious thing to compare it with is "Autobahn", though "Fur Immer" was released a year earlier. All three Neu! albums (I'll be honest, I haven't heard '86) are all glorious in their own way and though this is definitely more scattershot than '75 (my personal favorite) "more scattershot" isn't a criticism - all three Neu! albums are masterpieces and deserve much wider recognition than I think they generally get.

To @dellarig's point about Conny Plank - he is just one of the best music producers there's  been, and I don't know why his name isn't spoken of more often. He's pivotal to the whole Krautrock movement, produced Kraftwerk's Autobahn, worked with Ultravox, Killing Joke and Brian Eno, started his career with Marlene Dietrich (!) and finished it working with Eurythmics. Simply an amazing track record.

Here's a Spotify link. I'm going to give this one a go a little later tonight.

...a little later...

OK here are some scattered thoughts as I listen to this album, which is older than I am, for the very first time.

This first track, "Für Immer", sounds like it inspired every Chemical Brothers song over 8 minutes long. Really enjoying this so far. It feels really organic, like a live in-studio jam based largely on a six-note progression. If it is, one has to wonder how much of the groovy fades, effects and weird sonic stabs (for lack of a better term) happened during said jam, and how much happened in post-jam production. At least some of those stabs at the end sound an awful lot like breaking strings under layers of effects.

"Spitzenqualität" reminds me of starting a road trip and getting stuck in eventually dead-stopped traffic while cars fly by in the other direction. It blends into the solemn "Gedenkminute (für A + K)" pretty seamlessly - perhaps a moment of silence for the people in the accident that caused the aforementioned traffic.

I'm particularly enjoying pondering how many albums and artists have been influenced pretty heavily by this (and the album prior, of course). "Lila Engel" reminds me of early Butthole Surfers. "Neuschnee 78" sounds like something maybe Spacemen 3 would come up with late one night.

"Super 16" is really familiar - a quick Google confirms this showed up in Kill Bill and Master of the Flying Guillotine. This is some bad-ass boss fight music. (Is that a chainsaw?) At 2:45 or so is where you think you've won and the boss dies, but then it splits in two and grows new heads and tentacles and kicks your ass.

The lead synth in "Neuschnee" reminds me of one of the voices on an old Casio keyboard that a friend of mine had when we were kids. It's eerily similar. Fun little jam.

"Cassetto" sounds an awful lot like what happens when you record a bunch of stuff but the tape is warped but you don't want to waste everything so you try to salvage enough to make a song out of it and give up after 1:48.

"Super 78" feels like a tribute to an RPM that doesn't show up on nearly enough turntables any more.

"Hallo Excentrico!" just sounds like tapes of at least three people playing three different songs being played and manipulated at the same time. Reminds me of some of the William S. Burroughs cut-up stuff from the late '50s/early '60s.

After all this, "Super" shows up sounding like the closest Neu! comes to attempting a radio single on this album. I wonder how much this song inspired the Talking Heads' early sound.

Yup, that was fun. I'll definitely take more Neu! for a spin in coming weeks when I need background music at work.