The Devil, You + Me
| The Devil, You + Me | ||||
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| Studio album by The Notwist | ||||
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Publication |
2008 |
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| Label (s) | City slang | |||
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Format (s) |
CD, LP, MP3 |
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Electronica, post-rock , indie pop |
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Title (number) |
11 |
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running time |
43:59 |
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Studio (s) |
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Chart positions Explanation of the data |
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The Devil, You + Me is the seventh studio album by The Notwist . It was released on May 2, 2008 on the City Slang label .
Origin and style
The previous album Neon Golden had become the band's greatest success - both in terms of sales and in the reception of the critics. With Neon Golden, The Notwist had their first major success in both the USA and Japan. The pressure on the band for the next album was correspondingly great. Markus Acher spoke of an "incredible expectation"
In contrast to the previous album, The Devil, You + Me brings classic singer-songwriter elements to the fore. The "crunching and crackling" typical of Notwist, the background noises from Martin Gretschmann's computer, are almost completely absent from the record. The focus is on the mostly acoustic guitar and Markus Acher's voice. The band named Neil Young , Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen as formative influences .
The Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra has made arrangements for several pieces on the album.
As the first piece, "Good Lies" was offered for free download before the regular release date. With lines like "Let's just imitate the real, until we find a better one" (German for example: "We imitate the real until we find something better"), the song deals on the one hand with the new conceptions created by mass media such as television and the Internet of reality, on the other hand the view of the affluent society on poorer countries.
A music video with the actors Sandra Hüller and August Diehl was also released in advance for the title "Where in this World" .
reception
The readers of Spex magazine voted the album The Devil, You + Me at number 3 in the 2008 annual charts. It reached number 5 in the reader charts of plattentests.de.
The reaction of the critics of the music magazines was somewhat more restrained. The album made it to number 4 in the critics' annual charts of the intro , and to number 31 on Visions .
Reviews
“That's the miracle of The Notwist: they don't mix up simple songs with contingent noise. They traverse the complexity and arrive at a more exciting simplicity, where the sound fetishist can enjoy the subtle polyphony, but where one can also just indulge in melancholy. The fact that this miracle succeeds on eleven of eleven tracks is something the band in this country does not imitate. "
"Against the facets of" Neon Golden ", the long-awaited new album" The Devil, You + Me "seems disappointingly throttled at first. As is the case with good records, something only happens on the second, third, fourth round. The melodies become clearer. Or better: It becomes clear that this band was only interested in melodies that could be whistled in the end. The Notwist had taught you on "Neon Golden" to think anything is possible in a pop song. Now they seem to want to say: Everything is not everything. After a refined record that was produced in and out of every detail, they have now recorded eleven songs that, like the first called "Good Lies" or the third called "Gloomy Planets", live from the melody and not from what a melody is can still endure if you bombard them with gimmicks from all sides, with banjos, cellos and little bulbs from the laptop. "
"Acher raves about" a lot of older songwriting things and gospel music "that he heard while recording the album, he reports of the" interest in ambiguity ", of" different perspectives that arise within a song ", of the distortions in the music work, yes, of course also from the long back and forth that leaves the songs so wonderfully open. Notwist's real achievement is that at the end of this process there are no ten-minute prog rock monsters with 37 different sound layers. They want to be a pop band, out of spite. More precisely: a pop development program in the borderlands to jazz and electronics. "
Track list
- Good Lies (5:24)
- Where in This World (4:39)
- Gloomy Planets (4:50)
- Alphabet (3:03)
- The Devil, You + Me (3:39)
- Gravity (3:56)
- Sleep (3:46)
- On Planet Off (5:07)
- Boneless (2:57)
- Hands on Us (4:29)
- Gone Gone Gone (2:09)