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Rammstein - Rosenrot
“Rosenrot� is the latest release from the six German metal merchants following swiftly on from last years’ “Reise Reise�. The album begins with ‘Benzin’, which I have reviewed elsewhere on these pages, although I neglected to mention the sample from Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ in that review. Anyway, I found this a pounding, energetic track and I can guarantee it will be a blinding song when they play it live, knowing the band’s fondness for pyros.
The following track almost overdoes it with some electro sounds, but the band makes a good recovery with a big hefty chant. I enjoyed the big dirty bass lines in the title track ‘Rosenrot’, however this did seem a more basic track from a musical point of view. Rammstein can play better than this, maybe they were leaving it up to the lyrics to do all the talking. Sadly, I can’t remember much from my GCSE German – although I did understand most of ‘Benzin’, which seems to be mainly about dangerous, flammable or explosive chemicals. Looking back, I’m not sure why we studied this for our GCSE’s.
Track 6, unfortunately, has a woman singing in English all over it. Why they’ve chosen to do this, I don’t know, but to have a bloke growling in German then some lass wafting and warbling away in English after each of his lines sounds plain daft to me. Turns out it’s Sharleen Spiterri; and from her forced breathiness I think she’s trying to sound like Kylie with Nick Cave on “Where the Wild Roses Grow�. She fails. (Listen to ‘Murder Ballads’ to hear how it should be done). By this point of the album I was starting to get a bit worried; I wondered if Rammstein had become a bit too conceptual and were moving away from what (I think) they do best.
- Rammstein
- Rosenrot (2005)
- Category: Album
- Label: Island Records
- Reviewed by: The Manager
- Published on: 08 Nov 2005
- Comments: 0
- Beat Surrender Rating:
Weblinks
Add to favouritesFortunately again they save the album with the following song which is a return to basic metal. Then I nearly fell off the bus as the horns kicked in and we were treated to a Latino samba style track. I fully expected Gloria Estefan to duet on this one. Not very Rammstein at all.
All in all, I think the band are disappearing up their own ‘concept zone’. I was worried about this when I heard and reviewed ‘Reise Reise’, and I’m sorry to say, I was right. There are some decent metal tracks on the album, but these could be played better; they sound a bit basic compared to some other tracks by Rammstein. And some of the other stuff on here is indulgent garbage. Rammstein need to take a long hard look at themselves and their legacy then try and get their act together, before they get too clever for their own good. They’ve got all the tools to carry on making excellent music, but they don’t seem to be using them fully at the moment.
RAMMSTEIN? COUPLE OF DECENT TRACKS, SEVERAL TURKEYS.
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