Customer Reviews

Brimborium

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The remix album of Hau Ruck, Ruck Zuck, saved it from cookie-cutter songwriting and bland metal production with interesting synth accompaniments (WWIII), wild re-interpretations (Mini Mini Mini), and bizarre non-sequitirs (Ansage). I was hoping for the same from Brimborium. I got disappointment. Something of the inverse actually.

The parent album, Tohuvabohu, is a step in the right direction while its progeny has bland four on the floor additions so transparent that the only way you can tell it apart from the original is by the removal of various guitar loops. The best tracks on this remix, Combichrist's Tohuvabohu and Die Krupps' Looking For Strange, are just okay. Not worth the cost of the cd on their own. Buy those two tracks separately, run away, and don't look back!

A lot of the songs (especially the Die Krupps remix of Looking For Strange) were pretty good (better than the originals I thought). I'm more of a fan of their sound on symbols than anything else (I fairly liked WWIII too). Overall I liked it (the Superpower remix was boring and stupid in my opinion, the All Strung Up mix of Looking For Strange was weird and stupid too.)

Try it.

Change is good and this cd offers remixes from top bands like Die Krupps and Combichrist as well as remixes of songs from some of the members of the band. I still enjoy listening to this cd from time to time and don't think I'll ever get sick of it.

For the most part, these remixes are just bland and boring (minus the Combichrist remix) with a big yawn at the end. I suggest skipping this one. The album released version of each song is so much better than these remixes. And if you haven't bought Tohuvabohu yet, what are waiting for, it's one of their best albums ever recorded in recent years.

I finally found a KMFDM cd that did NOT impress me one bit. They have proven to me that remix cds can be dull, lifeless and repetitive with BRIMBORIUM, the remix version of TOHUVABOHU. While I don't think TOHUVABOHU is the band's best studio album to date, there are still enough songs on the album that I enjoy listening to. BRIMBORIUM on the other hand lacks the bite and diversity of RUCK ZUCK (remix EP of HAU RUCK). The only two tracks on this 70 minute plus some turkey is the Combichrist remix of "Tohuvabohu" and Die Krupp's remix of "Looking For Strange". Those are the songs that shows some bite to the music. Frankly I am not a fan of Angelspit and after hearing their contributions to the cd, I am still not a fan. Ditto with 16 Volt. Personally I think Erica Dunham (Unter Null), Angels on Acid, ex-KMFDM member Raymond Watts, and Hanzel und Gretyl would have done a far better job but that's just my personal opinion. I wish I could say that this was a good remix cd but I can't. KMFDM does truly suck in this case and I am not being facetious either.

First of all, I'm going to have to say that I like this album to a point. It suffers from remix-it is, a rare but ugly disease that sometimes warps tracks and makes them into things they weren't supposed to be, and that bothers me. It also has the new KMFDM bug that hurts the band --- I know the older members are never coming back but, well, I miss them. That seems to be the problem, too, and this cross is not just mine to bear.

New KMFDM seems to depend on what style of KMFDM you enjoy. If, for instance, you liked the works of Raymond Watts (Pig), En Esch (Slick Idiot), or several other lost colleagues then you might have trouble with the newer sounds. I personally find the tracks that Lucia sings to be a bit long and any of the albums (aside from Symbols) that Tim Skold was on a bit troublesome. Still, I think it has something to do with the formula change just as much as it has to do with KMFDM. I miss the sadistic places where Raymond would warm the hearth and I miss the purely Germanic stances that En Esch would take. Having heard what KMFDM COULD be - well, it hurts a bit.

That said, some of the new material is good when you get past that hurdle. A main deciding point is (a) the composer of the song (b) if the band seemed to try when it came to lyrics and (c) who rocks the mic. The newer stuff sometimes has a melodic sound I find appeasing and sometimes has a rudimentary sound that I like once I spin it five or six times. Being an old fan reverts my thoughts sometimes, too, and I really wonder if that is the culprit that hurts my old love for Cap. K and his new crew.

Everything said, you are the real KMFDM listener and will love or hate what you hear. Everyone else --- we could be right or we could be fans or a different ear in music. If you want to check out what you are going to get, go to Metropolis-records and see what a track or two sounds like or go to KMFDM's home. I suppose that is the most unbias way of deciding whether or not you should buy/ leave it be.

I just can't seem to understand why the newer KMFDM material is receiving so much bad press from almost everyone. Being a long time fan ( since the early 90's ) I think that even the newer released music is much better, if not light years ahead of everything else that is heard and played today. There isn't much out there anymore in terms of industrial, it seems to be a fading genre. I guess, to me the simple fact that KMFDM has never entirely gone mainstream or commercial in their entire 24 years makes them one the best, ever! I will and always love this band. Nothing that they have put out yet has ever disapointed me. Even if a few of their albums aren't quite as solid as others they still grow on me eventually. In a nut shell KMFDM beats all of the same old commercial crap out there today, period. For all of you haters around, All bands will and do change over the course of time. As for KMFDM, to still be going strong after 20+ years and not go commercial, they must being doing something right and the majority of fans out there obviously still love them to this day. 'Nuff said.

Justin.

I stopped listening to KMFDM after 2000; I own every single LP they produced before then, and not a single one after. (I borrowed this album from a friend, for the record.) Sascha Konietzko might prefer writing songs with a small core of people, but frankly, I don't give a damn. It was never about what he wanted, it's about what I wanted. I have the dollars, he wants to [sell] himself out, so he needs to do what I like. And what I like is what KMFDM used to do back before it was rearranged to be more convenient for Sascha: COLLABORATE.

That's what makes this remix album better than its parent album, "Tohuvabohu". The mere laying-on of extra hands makes as big a difference now as it ever did. See, nobody who was involved in KMFDM, not even the vaunted Raymond Watts himself, is any good at writing songs by themselves -- their saving grace as a group was their ability to each contribute something to the mix, and to know when someone else had done something better than they could do it. That gave the old albums a depth that I haven't seen since Adios, until this album came out.

It's just a pity that nowadays Sascha is so determined to be **happy** that he can't bring himself to do what works -- indeed, what has always worked -- until his own efforts are shat upon by the public, and he needs to come up with a different way to pay the bills. Some post-modern cog-in-a-machine he turned out to be.

Symbols was an excellent album, irreplaceable in the KMFDM history. It brought about Tim Skold who added SO MUCH to KMFDM, and once he left after ATTAK, they struggled in my opinion and WWIII wasn't as good, but they did without Raymond Watts and made Hau Ruck an amazing album, a fresh breath into KMFDM. Tohuvabohu sounded like a continuation of Hau Ruck, which isn't bad so far, but if they do the same thing again, it could get pretty old.

Brimborium seems to me to be a recognition of that fact, that KMFDM needs to move on again in order to continue to be great. Brimborium does what KMFDM used to normally do: bring in outsiders to help develop new paths to take. With anything they did, whether is was XTORT or ATTAK, their albums didn't have unified direction, they were scattered in what they had to offer, which meant they offered at least a little more than Tohuvabohu in terms of the amount of ideas that were worked with. Brimborium takes Tohuvabohu and brings in these needed extra directions and ideas and gives you what they need to be doing originally, and exactly what used to be presented.

Brimborium was a perfect next step for KMFDM to take I'm so glad they did it. Now that this is out I can't wait to see what they take from it. I hope they see that they need to go back to offering a ton of ideas in their albums. What saved Hau Ruck and Tohuvabohu was that the fewer ideas present were actually better than a lot of ideas they explored in the past, but they lost how interesting that amount of ideas made them. But the fact that Hau Ruck and Tohuvabohu sound like a double album is something that they hadn't done before and I hope they don't do again. Brimborium gives KMFDM fans what they need: multiple directions with their new ideas and hope that this multi-path band will continue to do what makes them great.

KMFDM doing it again, a treat for the freaks.

If you are a hardcore KMFDM fan then you need this CD. If this is going to be your first KMFDM CD then there are better choices.


Michael
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