La! Neu? - Blue (La Düsseldorf 5) (1999)

 

Krautrock / Synthpop

RIYL: Neu!, La Düsseldorf, Harmonia

 ✪ VINYL FANTASY 

★★★★★

Klaus Dinger, the more motorik counterpart to Neu!'s Michael Rother, kept making music of a similar caliber both on his own and with a rotating cast of collaborators long after the dissolution of the now-legendary krautrock duo in the late '70s. Due to unfortunate legal disputes and forced rebranding from his record label, his discography post-La Düsseldorf becomes increasingly scattered and overlooked, making it both practically difficult to track down for a listen and conceptually difficult to integrate into a cohesive whole. One of the most devastating consequences of that unraveling is that Blue, the fifth La Düsseldorf album (in spirit but not in name), remains massively under-appreciated even in the age of digital consumption where artists' entire catalogs are accessible with just the click of a button.

Released as the final studio album from Dinger's '90s moniker, La! Neu? (a somewhat misleading mash-up of his two identifiable band names used to market loose and improvisational music that bears little resemblance to either of those bands' output), Blue was actually recorded solo over ten years prior and rejected by Virgin Records after the termination of Dinger's contract. That delay, as well as the hodgepodge of styles and disparate audio fidelity of the six-track set, contribute toward a general feeling that the record was more of a compilation of odds and ends tacked onto La! Neu?'s discography as an afterthought, despite comprising arguably some of the best pieces in the entire La Düsseldorf canon.

Seemingly random sequencing aside, each of Blue's six tracks shine brightly from their own glistening worlds of sound. "Arms Control Blues", a slow burn which might've been better off closing the set, makes for a lush and meditative guitar melody as Dinger's sunset-washed tones eke out a hypnotic strum, over which he languidly laments the acceleration of the weapons development during the Cold War. "Blue", a strikingly upbeat synthpop track that features bright, bubbly vocals courtesy of Yvi, plunges his signature energetic riffs into the ocean, with rippling effects scattering rainbow light in all directions at once. "Lilienthal" dives deeper and adds a propulsive rhythm section for an instrumental piece that compresses layer upon layer of satisfying textural noise. "Touch You Tonight" borrows from the glam-rock and post-punk of the time for a scuzzed-out banger that wouldn't sound out of place at a trendy underground club, while "Für Omi" provides some respite with a brief and tender familial lullaby.

Closing out the compilation is the monstrosity that is "America", an 18-minute live version of one of Dinger's most successful solo tracks that is just as unhinged and violent as the sordid history of its namesake country. Over impassioned, searing guitar squall he layers an otherworldly amount of feral noise, the extended composition exploding outward like a cancerous growth on the original melody, over which the lyrics appropriately eviscerate the United States' racist and colonial foundations on "stolen land". There's a tremendous display of dynamism across this rendition alone as well as the five tracks that lead up to it, and each fascinating experiment has me wishing Dinger had composed a full album honing in on its particular aesthetic. Both the representative Blue and his late-period discography as a whole lack the careful cohesion we've become accustomed to in music's modern age, but the final album from the La! Neu? project just goes to show that Klaus Dinger's brilliance could simply not be contained.