Aus

Reviews

Aus Der Sch​ö​ne Schein EP

A new three-song EP from these Berlin-based creatures of the night who have been keeping the shadow-dimmed flames of XMAL DEUTSCHLAND and MALARIA! burning into the third millennium—their stern, goth-adjacent post-punk has all of the coldness and severity of a concrete Eastern Bloc factory floor. Opener “Der Sch​ö​ne Schein” plunges headlong into an abyss of tom-pounded drums, sinister bass rumble, and a tension only heightened by the sharp clips of air raid siren guitar that soon join in, before slipping into borderline funky death-disco choruses without ever breaking their stone-faced (and likely heavily black-eyelinered) facade. Likewise, the swirls of keys shrouding “Zugvögel” could have just as easily been pulled from a campy ’60s horror flick as early ’80s leather-and-lace deathrock, while its strict rhythms and austere German vocals are nothing but deadly serious, and “LSD” percolates along a pendulum-swinging cyclical bass line and an unwavering, bone-rattling beat for nearly three minutes before the vocals finally cut in like echoes in a claustrophobic crypt. Pitch-black perfection.

Aus II LP

Icy, synth-saturated German post-punk in the tradition of MALARIA! or XMAL DEUTSCHLAND—expect severe rhythms driven by cavernous bass and tom-heavy drumming with only the most minimal presence of cymbals, coolly distant vocals that maintain a palpable edge of drama, and sparse, needling guitar applied with exacting precision. The level of restraint exercised in the more slowly snaking tracks on II (“Bilderflut” and “1000 Umdrehungen” in particular) is genuinely haunting and unnerving in a way that legions of chorus-pedal-dependent modern dark-punk groups have aspired to but never fully achieved, with AUS stripping their sound to such an elemental framework that the subtraction of anything else would cause the songs to just crumble into dust. Top notch!