‘Hanzel und Gretyl Fur Immer’ comes as a counterpart to the duo’s 2012 album, the dubiously-titled ‘Born To Be Heiled’ features reworkings of the album’s tracks by KyzrWolf. The wolf brings a techno-industrial feel to the thumping Neue Deutsche Härte chug of HuG grind out as standard with such relish. With the clattering percussion of Ministry circa ‘The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste’, the frenetic buzz-and-bubble electronica of KMFDM, and the heavily processed vocals of Front Line Assembly.
I could throw out myriad reference points, but essentially it’s a crossover between the sound of Rammestien and Skinny Puppy, with strongly Germanic leanings that go beyond the rather iffy cover art. When I say iffy, I mean it’s highly problematic.
I have no reason to doubt the band’s statement that ‘Hanzel und Gretyl don’t have any political message whatsoever, and I think pretty much everyone will notice rather quickly that this band is in about as serious as GWAR, Lordi’ or that ‘All they do is play and toy around with controversial to get your attention.’
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But controversial for the sake of grabbing attention isn’t so smart when it comes to flirtations with fascist iconography. Assuming it is ironic and as willfully dumb as song titles like ‘More German than German’ suggest, it’s still a bad idea, because it’s likely to draw an undesirable element to the fan-base and attract the wrong sort of attention. The worst case scenario, of course, is that they’re lying through their teeth, although I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
So, politics aside, lots of pumping hard techno beats and repetitive musical motifs provide the main body of the sound, that’s driving and relentless and does get the adrenaline up – although after a while it does grow rather tiresome, both sonically in in terms of the faux-Teutonic muscle-flexing.
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