Bearing in mind the current precarious political global situation, your reviewer's largely aghast by the lack of musical broadsides around, and as a rule the last place he'd expect polemic to come flying from like gobs of vitriol would be the dance scene.
But then maverick DJ/ noise terrorist Marco Haas (aka T.RAUMSCHMIERE) is a man who likes to have feet in both rock and dance camps and his teeth cutting formative days as a self-confessed punk have ensured that while he's been making a name for blitzkreig techno (see previous singles "Monstertruckdriver" and "Rabaukendisko") he can headline both the Camden Barfly AND Fabric while in London and lay down a kicking John Peel session while he's at it, the talented,diverse bugger.
So why not release a snarling, well-observed and lyrically primed slice of glitchy hip-hop as your next single into the bargain, eh? Because in effect that's what Haas has done with "A Million Brothers (Blah Blah Blah)", thanks to a crunching lope of a groove and guest MC Soom T's heartfelt lyrical rant ("I deplore who you stand for, hate who you are, hate you now speaking with your blah blah blah"), which rages defiantly against the dying of the light and is far closer to Crass than Cypress Hill in terms of lyrical invective, all things considered.
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Strike a light. Then he keeps us on our toes thanks to the slightly more familiar stompy techno of the uncompromising "Querstromzerspaner" (no, me neither) and gets some heavy friends to weigh in with effective remixes. The Sub Species one (featuring one Justin Broadrick who once blew your delicate reviewer's ears out in his Godflesh days) is the nastier - with a hectoring bass overload and a bald, unadorned vocal mix that sounds angry as shag - but the better is Pole's, where Berliner Stefan Betke brings his specially sanitised bloopy dub into play and gives the tune a clipped skanky feel that's all the more attractive.
"A Million Brothers", then, marries erudite lyrical militancy with programmed analogue crunch and comes up trumps. The protest song tradition lives on, it seems, in the unlikeliest of musical genres.
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