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Japanische Kampfhörspiele: Luxusvernichtung - Vierundfünfzig vertonte Kurzgedichte

29/01/13 || Habakuk

I remember we had a review for this one, but it’s a) gone and b) I felt like it didn’t do the EP at hand justice anyway. Which is understandable. See, “Luxusvernichtung” is a recording where speaking German is well, not mandatory, as it can still be enjoyable, but you’d be missing out on almost everything. To me, JaKa seriously had always been more of an arts project than just a band, in that their radical yet humorous approach to everything is hard to align with “traditional expectations” of even a grindcore band. But first things first.

I’m still standing by my statement that these guys were among the best things that have come out of Germany for a long, long time, and since they split up a few years back, they can’t fuck up that legacy of theirs, even though some albums were less than stellar. This band’s mission was basically, perform a sarcastic roundhouse kick through everything perceived wrong with our culture, and do so in whatever fashion seems fit – and what better funnel for this than grind. JaKa’s music is meant to alienate, with the lyrics however by and large understandable to German speakers despite a hysterical two-man delivery. They’re one of these bands you show to someone who’s not into metal at all, and he/she will think you’re completely out of your mind. “You call that music???” – JaKa revel in just that, often combining their lyrics with the most banal sampling of self-demasking TV shows, advertisements and so forth, to form an ugly travesty of everything agreed on in modern world.

For “Luxusvernichtung” the band went a step further in the whole “we don’t give a shit about what you can or cannot do” direction. Building off an absolutely mindblowing creative output, they just decided to take everything that was left over in terms of riffs, arrangements and lyrics sheets, record and just release it as-is.

Consequently, here are 54 “songs”, or fragments thereof, which are no longer than 20 seconds, mostly. And an instrumental version of all of them together at the end. So yeah, I guess these folks were not interested in “making an album” to begin with, and the caricature of the concept is exactly what makes this great. “Oh, so they’re just some kind of artsy shit” – Well, the good thing about JaKa has always been that the music, or rather the tons of riffs accompanying the lyrical outbursts are often better than what other bands have put out in their entire career. No difference here, just that almost no part is repeated. Now some might say, “well if they were so great, it would have been better if they had worked on that stuff a little and made a proper album” – true maybe from a music critic’s standpoint, but missing the point completely. Which is what I meant with these guys not being a normal band: They are a complete mockery of whatever you expect.

The lyrics are at the center of the whole thing (“54 melodized short poems”, the subtitle reads) and are nothing short of genius – combining sujets like terrorism with western beauty craze, holding the mirror up to the scene, the media, the business world, society, everything you do in your daily, miserable life. Yet there are a few tracks that were already more mature in their development at the time of recording – see “Werd doch”, “Herrenloser Koffer” or “Krise”, which last about a minute. Those longer bits are glimpses of both the insane lyrical potential as well as the effective arrangements these guys were capable of. This is, after all, not a bunch of talentless hacks that played the joke card to have something going for them. They just didn’t care about processing their ideas further, which gives this album even more of that “collage” feel that had always set JaKa apart from the normal grind crew.

If you speak German and like grind and intelligence, there is no way around this. Everybody else, well, it’s still quite a fun and intense listen, but you might not be able to agree with my:

Information
Released: 2009
Label: unundeux
Website: JaKa / Luxusvernichtung on Bandcamp

Band
Markus ‘Bony’ Hoff: vocals
Martin Freund: vocals
René Hauffe: guitars
Klaus Nicodem: guitars
Marco Bachmann: bass
Christof Kather: drums

Tracklist
1. das duale system
2. vorort
3. mikrokosmos
4. momo
5. konfekt
6. die vermarkter
7. klavier seziert
8. explosiv
9. pogoläden
10. beau
11. stunden
12. metallica
13. die art
14. die opfer und die täter
15. schmerzensgeld
16. managerseminar
17. guten appetit
18. milchgläserner bürger
19. der sozialphobiker
20. businessclass
21. austausch
22. rauchen l
23. verbraucher
24. gewinner
25. leben
26. guten tag
27. enttieren
28. freitag
29. misanthropie
30. abi
31. rauchen ll
32. überall
33. werd doch
34. alle müssen weg
35. wurstscheiben
36. vernetzte welt geht unter
37. achtunddreissig
38. sklaven der uhr
39. dyskalkulie
40. krise
41. sie schreiben drauf
42. zerhätschelt
43. nicht folgsam
44. herrenloser koffer
45. liebe islamisten
46. essen
47. talk
48. meine spannenden nachbarn
49. vollkommen
50. würde
51. halsabschneider
52. alle regler auf anschlag
53. das leichte leben
54. alles nochmal auf anfang
55. untitled (instrumental)

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