German punk-stars, Die Toten Hosen (more HERE) - and massive TV Smith fans (see HERE) - recently unleashed a new album called Ballast Der Republik. The album has all the expected massed guitars and soaring choruses that make you want to shout-along to whatever the fuck they're saying.
As the bonus disk, the band recorded a set of amped-up covers of influential German artists. I'll confess to my own ignorance and say I only recognize Kraftwerk's "The Model" and eighties synth-pop staple, "Rock Me Amadeus" by Falco:
Let us know what you make of DTH giving Amadeus a roughing up in the COMMENTS section.
TV Smith (more here), formerly of The Adverts (more HERE) re-recorded some of his best work with German super-punk-stars Die Toten Hosen (his fourth biggest fans). The album, Useless: The Very Best of T.V. Smith
proves his peculiar genius. Specifically, TV proves what a deft
re-interpreter of his own material he really is because he never gets
caught in that old stuff vs. new stuff war that artists and their fans
can get dragged into. To TV, it's all the present:
Musically, Die Toten Hosen's (more here)
backing him up on material spanning much of his career (but, sadly, not
1979-1983) proves how devastatingly consistent and relentlessly
inventive the man is. Lyrically, TV and co. chose songs like "Gather
Your Things and Go" and "My String Will Snap" that portray a world
out-of-sorts, a world unjustly turned upside down. While Smith's never
had truck with religion, he decries the wickedness of the world like a
biblical prophet, just listen to his
voice-of-one-screaming-in-the-wilderness anthem, "Get Ready for the Axe to Drop" for proof. To hear TV and the Dead Pants (as they might be known
in English) work this theme to its most brutal effect, witness
"Expensive Being Poor" one of the most excoriating broadsides ever
written, a sharp paradox wrapped in a tune you could hum yourself to
death with:
Smith's worldview is never clearer than on the album's sole new track,
"Only One Flavour". Here, TV hoists himself up onto the rickety platform
of the post-Communist left and, in a pique and at a peak, decries the
monotony of political discourse in a capitalist society (see how even
that sentence sounds awfully pre-1989). Useless, which
shows off Smith's catalog of stirring songs that mix punk brio with
folk tropes and that joyously hammer away at the the necessity at
looking at our problems through different eyes (though maybe not Gary
Gilmore's), is anything but.
So while the physical version (LP, CD) of Useless is seemingly out-of-print, the MP3 is back at iTunes, but to hear the single go to the COMMENTS section
Die Toten Hosen (more HERE) followed their 1991 punk covers album, Learning English Lesson One, with an all-English album of originals called, Love, Peace & Moneyin 1994. That album (which I bought in the dollar bin at Extreme Noise in Minneapolis in '95), seemed a bit grunge-damaged at the time but now sounds like a fun rock-punk mix with Wagnerian production.
This EP, donated to us by Bristolboy from the fantastic My Life's a Jigsaw (as a response to this gift from our reader, Roberto - don't you just love the cycle of giving!) comes from that album. Both album tracks, "Love Song" and "My Land" are cynical and utterly catchy and well worth your time. It seems lesson two of the band's plan to learn English was to form an alliance with The Boys, whose members Honest John Plain and Matt Dangerfield get writing credits on every song on Love, Peace & Money, including the two aforementioned anthems. One of those Boys, John Plain also get a co-writing credit on the terrace-echoing football song, "Long Way From Liverpool" and (I believe) he and Dangerfield pitch in on a foul-mouthed-but-still-kinda-clever cover of "Guantanamera" that would've sent Pete Seeger into an axe-wielding frenzy! Plus you get the band running through "Whole Wide World" with it's writer, Wreckelss Eric (more HERE) on lead vocals.
Don't leave the house without MRML's New Year's gift stapled onto your iPod (oh that wasn't the verb I needed was it?) Last time we dedicated a post to Die Toten Hosen we said "they have for decades have ruled the charts of their native Germany by mixing the swagger of glam rock, the aggro of '77 punk and and the sing-along choruses of schlager (a central and Northern European easy listening genre whose name sounds like a portmanteau of schmaltz and lager for good reason). Now I'm going to send you sprawling into 2010 with the sound of the Dead Pants (en anglais) curb-stomping Guy Lombardo.
It's a riotous 2:32 that, in tribute to "Auld Lang Syne's" Scottish author, Robbie Burns, has bagpipes alongside the loud guitars. Die Toten Hosen's take on this old folk standard recalls the Sex Pistols derangement of "Friggin' in the Riggin", there's even an exact moment where you can imagine someone shouting "Give it some bollocks" just before the song goes into overdrive. Who cares if the boys add some 'new' verses about "pubs in Inverness" when the song's such a blast?
The rest of this 1999 E.P. is filled out with two fine-sounding Deutsch sing-alongs as well as an unplugged versions of "Auld Lang Syne" and "Little Drummer Boy".
"(Ronnie) Biggs is a fool, a buffoon....if you're going to worship a train robber, why not the one who got the money?" Johnny Rotten
For decades Die Toten Hosen have ruled the charts of their native Germany by mixing the swagger of glam rock, the aggro of '77 punk and and the sing-along choruses of schlager (a central and Northern European easy listening genre whose name sounds like a portmanteau of schmaltz and lager for good reason). Outside Deutschland, the band, whose name means "The Dead Pants", are best known for the 1991 album Learning English: Lesson 1, in which they covered punk classics by the likes of the Ramones, the Vibrators and MRML favourite Wreckless Eric, each with a guest from the original version. It's an impressive achievement, though no more musically memorable than their albums of schlager songs and Christmas carols done under the pseudonym Die Roten Rosen.
The key to this seemingly backward-looking exercise is in the sole original,"Carnival in Rio". The special guest on this track (and on the two B-sides: the Sex Pistols' '"Everybody is Innocent" and Eddy Grant via the Clash's "Police on My Back") is notorious lowlife and Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs. To say Biggs comes off as like your disheveled, creepy old uncle, is sort of an insult to the disheveled, creepy old uncles of the world.
Fortunately, Biggs is used here as a punk prop (watch singer Campino give up on trying to get Biggs to sing at the 34 second mark) just as he was with the very late period Sex Pistols. While Malcolm McLaren used him to hide the fact that the Sex Pistols were dead, Die Toten Hosen use him, and a shit-load of curses, to disguise their song's surprisingly sweet sentiment. "Carnival in Rio (Punk Was)"is where the band lays their guts on the line. The song is both a tribute to their forefathersand a paean to punk's indomitable spirit of defiant optimism, exemplified by those shouts of, "It'll all be coming back!" at the end. Amen. Punk never dies, fuckers.
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