Dresden ’45 – Feuertod

“Feuertod” is the first release by Marcel Mulack, a guy from Germany who is responsible for the music on this beautiful heavy picture disc. Judging from the artwork (a soldier with a horrible burned face on side A, airplanes dropping bombs on a certain German city on side B) and songtitles like “Stahsturm” and “Feuertod”, I expected the music to be something like harsh power noise with lots of WW II samples…. Although this release obviously deals with the bombing of Dresden and the total ravage afterwards, the majority of songs on this record are more tranquil and soundscape-like than I expected at first.

“Zera”, the opener of the album, is a short track harbouring a pleasant melody with sounds of machinery and clashing steel woven through it. This track is followed by the long “Februar”, which is more or less a sound collage consisting of eerie background noises, snaredrums, and some sampled marching tunes. When listening to it I had the feeling it would built up towards some sort of climax; the quite oppressing bunker feel of the track just screamed for a harsh and extreme outburst at some point, but destruction didn’t come…yet… The following two tracks on the other hand are more harsh, especially the last track on side A can be described as harsh rhythmic industrial.

Onwards to side B. “Stahlsturm” is again a more tranquil peace in the vein of the opener on side A, which even reminded me a bit of Raison d’Etre. Calm keyboard parts with the constant sound of clashing metal infiltrating the atmospheric melodies. The following two tracks (especially the title track) show us once more the more noisy side of Dresden ’45; heavy drones, feedbacking noises, and some dark vocal samples. Finally, the album concludes with “The day after”, which differs somewhat from the rest of the tracks. Once could say this one is more in the vein of Wappenbund or Der Blutharsch; slow pounding drums, keyboards, and sampled speeches.
In short: a nice and varied release that really fits the concept of this project, although I would have appreciated it even more with just a bit more emphasis on the harsh rhythmic side.

artist:
label: Torpor Records
details: picture lp, limited to 500 copies