Einstürzende Neubauten have long made a career of taking a wrecking ball to the staid towers of musical convention. Their seminal industrial excess having become a musical institution in Germany--aligning them somewhat to the left of Kraftwerk and Can--they turn the wrecking ball on themselves on Silence Is Sexy. Employing aural texture, murmurs, hushed vocals, and, yes, silence, instead of the Sturm und Drang of collapsing buildings, monstrous machinery, and industrial decay, Silence defies all preconceived notions of what an Einstürzende Neubauten album should sound like. The title track manages to imbue long patches of complete silence with a backbeat and groove, proving their titular claim. Blixa Bargeld--perhaps having learned a thing or two about terrible beauty from his work with Nick Cave--imbues his deep-toned vocals with warmth and emotion, and while at moments the music can careen out of control, for the most part it wavers on the lower fringes of the sonic spectrum. Now that the sonic ceiling has been shattered, perhaps EN want to prove the complexity of silence. Ah, but not for long! Accompanying Silence Is Sexy is a second disc featuring the single, seemingly unending composition "Pelikonal," an improvised duet between a repeated vocal phrase and a drill--not much more pleasant than getting root canal. Yikes. --Tod Nelson

NOT REMASTERED!

Despite its title--Latin for "clean slate" but, more likely, a play off the concept of beginning again--Einstürzende Neubauten's seventh full-length is a culmination of everything that has come before for this extraordinary band. Sure, they were known for making hellish noise in their early days, employing rocks, circular saws, and drills in their performances, but they were musicians, too, crafting elegant songs by the late 1980s that still possess an affecting power. Tabula Rasa, released in 1993, contains all these elements and ups the ante considerably. For one thing, it's a much more varied listen than its predecessor, the grimly powerful Haus der Lüge. The exuberantly melodic ("Zebulon") bumps up against the darkly experimental ("12305[te Nacht]") and the outright rockin' ("Die Interimsliebenden"). But the most startling track must be the ethereal "Blume," a sexually charged lullaby that's fraught with the thick layers of symbolism we've come to expect from lyricist Blixa Bargeld. Sung--in English!--by Anita Lane, whose voice registers somewhere near the Cranes' Alison Shaw, it sounds like nothing we've ever heard before from Neubauten. The disc closes with the 15-minute "Headcleaner," a mesmerizing, bombastic, symphonic cacophony that interpolates the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." It all ends quietly, but your ears may never be the same again. --Steve Landau

Digitally remastered digipak reissue of the 1989 album by this innovative and groundbreaking German Industrial band. At times, hard to listen to, E.N. have always been hard to ignore. Their brilliance lies in their ability to provoke a thoroughly intelligent reaction from the listener as opposed to an irrational outburst. 10 tracks. Some Bizarre. 2006.

Emerging from Berlin at the dawn of the '80s, Einstürzende Neubauten crafted a distinctive postpunk, proto-industrial sound that the group is still expanding on 18 years later. Typically, a Neubauten track combines abrasive machine sounds and the simplest of musical elements--spare bass lines, aggressive chants, thudding beats--to produce surprisingly atmospheric music. Ende Neu's "Was Ist Ist" embodies the band's punk-plus-machine attack, while "Installation No. 1" throbs with the pulse that spawned a thousand industrial groups. But the CD's most striking tracks recall the work of dramatic artists like Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg more than raging power tools. Not a surprise when you consider that singer-guitarist Blixa Bargeld has played with cabaret rockers the Bad Seeds and that Neubauten members have scored numerous films and theater works. A highlight of the album is the exquisite "Stella Maris"--a lovely duet sung by Bargeld and actress Meret Becker, accompanied by strings! --Fred Cisterna

Remastered reissue of their 2nd album from 1983 with 3 bonus tracks, 'DNS Wasserturm', 'Wardrobe' & 'Blutvergiftung'. Digipak.