Reviews

Aufnahme + Wiedergabe

Happy Straps Pleasures 1985​–86 LP

Cold war post-punk from East Berlin featuring two members who would later form the nu-metal-adjacent industrial band RAMMSTEIN in the ’90s, but don’t hold that against them! Pleasures 1985–86 cherry-picks tracks from HAPPY STRAPS’ two cassettes (1985’s What a Pleasure and 1986’s Last Pleasure), and opener “We Live in Paradise” is a bit of a stylistic outlier within the context of the rest of the collection, following a fairly basic and rudimentary first-wave punk template, although the warbling vocals and interjections of space age synth point to some weirder creative impulses clearly at work. The rest of the A-side also skims the band’s first tape, including “Railway Station,” a stuttering post-punk spy theme with co-vocalist Claudia Böhme’s delivery splitting the difference between hiccuping and deadpan, right up there with the best ’80s femme-led Euro art-punk (LILIPUT, HANS-A-PLAST, TRÜMMERFRAUEN, you name it), and “Running Away,” which recalls the dreamy, beauty-in-drone side of SST-era SONIC YOUTH (think EVOL’s “Starpower”) or the less frantic side of MISSION OF BURMA. Last Pleasure is covered on the B-side, with HAPPY STRAPS wandering down darker, unsettling goth corridors—the graveyard-dwelling atmospheric guitar, sinister bass rumble, and guitarist Christian Jaeger’s howling vocals on ”White Bird” all echo early BAUHAUS, while the gnarled, barely minute-long “Tod” (German for “death”) crawls bleary-eyed through some BAD SEEDS wreckage, and the Claudia-sung “Tape Song” plunges into the depths of cavernous bass and a death disco beat. The Tapetopia series that this LP is a part of has been bringing all sorts of gems from East Germany’s cassette underground (like, way underground) to light, and this might be one of the best installments yet.

Nontoxic Intoxicated LP

Unearthed from East Germany’s underground cassette releases of the ’80s, the Tapetopia project brings us a set of NONTOXIC tracks based on 1989’s Haus der Jurgen Talente show (often stylized HdjT, a youth center in East Berlin). Gleaned from drummer Henning Rabe’s write-up on the Tapetopia site (worth reading if this music resonates with you), lead singer Bernd Shulz, who at the time had a blues band with guitarist Danilo Steinert, heard the title track from the the CURE’s The Top album beaming in from a West Berlin radio station, after which they quickly traded in their twelve-bar aspirations for something darker and more spacious. While inspired by the CURE (and perhaps the English darkwave scene writ large; SISTERS OF MERCY also come to mind), NONTOXIC tried to carve out their own sound and image, away from British imitation, and away from the boots, army belts, and shaved heads of local bands. The fact that the dark, cold, and angry cries of this music found a home in the heavily oppressed GDR comes as little surprise, and while the genre wasn’t created in East Berlin, its social landscape of the ’80s makes for no better poster child. Fascinating history aside, I do genuinely enjoy all ten tracks on this Intoxication LP—maybe wait for a colorless day this fall and brood in the icy synth and guitar, in the deeply rich and sad vocals, in the clamorous shuffle of drum and sludgy bass. Very cool that this music has seen a new release since its inception, given the fact that during that time tape recorders were scarce and the music had little circulation. I’m excited to hear more from this nearly misplaced era.

Rosa Beton Demo 83 cassette

In 1983, two East Berlin teens with a four-track recorded a clandestine punk demo in one of their bedrooms, dubbing their illicit project ROSA BETON (“pink concrete”). The duo was never able to perform live in the Stasi-controlled GDR where punks were systematically surveilled and targeted as threats to the state, and the cassette was likewise never openly distributed, but copies were still passed along to friends in secret, single-handedly preserving ROSA BETON’s mythology over time. Just as their chosen name subverted the reality of East Berlin’s brutalist urban landscape (monochromatic concrete exteriors, unrelenting angles, function over form) by introducing a pop of color, the pair’s musical approach took a similar turn—stripped-down and austere, with some sly art influences behind the stark facade. “Stehen Bleiben is Verrat” flirts with sharp, stitled rhythms in an early EX/RONDOS-like fashion, “Scheißstadt Berlin” and “16 Jahre im Exil” could pass for degraded third-generation dubs of Pink Flag-era WIRE demos (complete with dry two-part harmonies), and “Wir Glauben” scratches and collapses for 90 blown-out seconds as well as anything in the SWELL MAPS/Messthetics pantheon. So cool that this exists. Interestingly, the B-side of this reissue is actually 2022 re-recordings of the full 1983 demo (minus one track) by original guitarist/vocalist Thomas Wagner and three new bandmates, completely transforming the songs from primitivist teenage DIY clamor to hi-def, synth-battered electro-punk with tandem-shouted male/female vocals—think LOST SOUNDS with a Neue Deutsche Welle twist.