Customer Reviews

Goodbye

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Delicate and sublime with a stirring of ecstasy dancing over a driving powerful intoxication is what you will find if you listen to Goodbye first. It is the perfect place to start this journey into soul shivering musical escape. The song surges and sways bursting from the limits of sound into an unbelievably ecstatic moment in time. This goes beyond inspiration to new levels of creativity where modern technology and ancient longings collide. At times it is crystalline perfection and at others the warm sounds completely surround you enveloping you in a dreamy haze.

If you listen to the album from start to finish you will first encounter silky washes of sound with ethereal vocals. "Stars" is almost chilling with dramatic elements that seem to seek to overwhelm with psychedelic swirls and epic sonic power. Vocals cascade over driving beats like a waterfall and then a plane suddenly lands. The dreamy "Einfeld" has a renewed clarity but still retains the warm washes of sound ebbing and flowing from the first tracks. "In Between the Years" is like a snowstorm and a warm fire with distant echoes of haunting chill. It invites you closer and then sends you spinning off into starscapes.

"Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" wakes up this album with a spontaneous fusion of lush layering and nostalgia. You can sink deeply into the memories of this track and yet it has the excitement of new discovery. This song and the mesmerizing "Goodbye" both give me shivers. "A Song about Hope" is much more mellow and has a captivating rhythm that keeps your full attention as the song soars in luminous orchestral beauty. "Medusa" is much darker introspective piece with static urban elements and echoes. "For Good" has the sounds of lonely acoustic guitar and distant brooding longing.

As a relaxing chill out album this offers a sinking into the feeling of escape while it plays with the ideas of fragility and power. Warm washes of sound mingle with ethereal vocals throughout and capture many moods and places that are exciting and serene all at once.

If you love this album you may also enjoy music by Feist, Evening Ocean, Hooverphonic, Between Interval, Zero 7 and The Album Leaf.

~The Rebecca Review

Ulrich Schnauss occpupies a very unusual space between ambient and dance pop, that no-one else gets close. I absolutely love it. Thinking man's ambient pop. Just listen to track 3 - Stars for a perfect introduction to Schnauss at his best. A galactic retro dance pop classic. The production and synthetic sounds are just sublime. I think it is excellent chillout music except I mean that as great music to play whilst having dinner with friends (not the turgid music that generally fills this genre). I do agree that it is probably not as good as the first two albums, but given that the are near perfect I hardly think that this is a problem.
Highly recommended!

Ulrich Schnauss has always specialized on sweeping, ghostly wintry electronica, the sort of thing that gives you tundra dreams.

Technically, you can only do that so many times before people start getting tired of it. But in "Goodbye," he explores some new sounds -- Britpop meldings, ambient sweeps, and some truly epic explorations into a strange new electronic world.

It opens with gently ringing synth, which practically smothers the gentle beats and a murmuring voice that never quite forms words. Call it angel electronica. The second song is something of a stumble -- Schnauss collaborates with Long-View, in a song that sounds like a merry-go-round of stoned vocals.

But then with "Stars," he erupts into a a tightly wound melody that slowly builds to a messily epic crescendo. From there, Schnauss mingles new work with old: sleepily ambient electronica, haunting fuzz experimentals, angular creepy electropop, and more soaring epics like "Song About Hope."

It ends with a sort of mellow acoustic guitar that slowly melts into a soft synth tune... and what sounds like a musician cleaning up and leaving the studio. It's a suitable ending to what sounds like a transition album, as if Schnauss is feeling out what he can do other than sleepy electronica.

And somehow, without giving it a jumbled feel, he succeeds -- you can hear some drum machines and piano buried down there, and there's a flicker of ringing guitar in places, giving the nebulous melodies some solidarity and helping build them up.

But the overriding presence is synth. Synth, synth, synth. And here's Schnauss's real skill: he molds them into soaring epics, windblown stretches, fuzzy twists, and -- in "Medusa" -- elaborately twisted dark explorations of just how far you can push a complex melody.

Ulrich Schnauss explores some new territory in his third full-length album, the hopefully unportentous "Goodbye." But we just said hello!

A lot of reviewer's totally missed the point of this album. Yes, it's more rock and guitar oriented than his first two albums, but that's the point. As Ulrich Schnauss's electronic albums have always been heavily influenced by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Ride, Lush and The Cocteau Twins, this time he pays literal homage to the genre by basically recreating a rock album electronically. The results are layer upon layer of sound, that for some will take a while to fully emerge. Give this album a chance, and you will see the depth of its beauty. IMO, Ulrich can do no wrong. Also check out the excellent remixes he has done for other artists.

Ulrich Schnauss's previous albums "A Strangely Isolated Place" and "Far Away Trains Passing By" are as good as it gets for this type of music, masterfully balancing the up-beat & ecstatically joyful with the poignant (depressive). By comparison "Goodbye" falls short, sounding mostly murky--with minor-mode harmonies and far too many Enya-inspired whispering vocals. A weariness and defeatism permeates most tracks. For someone who likes mostly classical that's not good enough to inspire repeated listening. Let's hope for more like the first two albums, which are in their own--transcendentally beautiful-- class.

What's there to say? This is absolutely my favorite album of all time. There's nothing to even compare it to... it will probably make you cry and smile, euphoric and sad.

I've read a couple of "professional" reviews that complain about how this CD belongs in the '90s because of (insert what some other artist I don't care about was doing in those days). I don't care if it belongs in the 1990s, or even the 1890s. Good music is timeless, and who cares what decade it's "from"? I don't spurn Beethoven because he isn't contemporary. These reviews smack of audio snobs pretending to be geniuses because they have some knowledge of what artist X was doing circa 1993, trying to be edgy by throwing out some needlessly cynical comparison that does nothing to tell the average listener whether they might like the album. "Professional" reviewers, please take note: Just because someone did something somewhat similar in the past doesn't mean that you look cool when you trash someone for doing something like it today. I would rather drive a modern Bentley than a Ford Model T, even though Ford "did it first." Thanks in advance.

The one thing the ranters say that I will agree on is that the vocals are so indistinct as to be maddening at times. Simply including the lyrics in the CD jacket would have satisfied my curiosity. Mixing the music so that the voices are distinct would have made this better, in my eyes. Schnauss could pursue a "voice as instrument, with the sound of the voice being more important than particular words" angle if he had just included the lyrics.

What I will tell you is this: Regardless of what Cygnus X was doing when I was in high school, and regardless of what Boards of Canada was doing when I bought my first car, or any other irrelevant tripe that brings you no closer to a buy/no-buy decision, this album is worth buying if you like Schnauss. Unfortunately, the album isn't available on Amazon MP3 at the time of writing. If you were hoping for another album the likes of Far Away Trains Passing By, this DOES have some tunes that are up to that standard. I don't think Stars is all that great. I would have left it out entirely, or just deleted the vocals. The constant and periodically not-properly-synchronized high speed flanging in In Between The Years is a little irritating as well. The remaining tracks are at the very least worth listening to, and in some cases, should reward the average Schnauss fan.

What really drew me to this album was Einfeld, and later, Goodbye. This is some of Schnauss' best work. If the album was available on Amazon MP3, and I had to pick only two tracks to download, they would be at the top of my list. If you have heard Far Away Trains..., and you liked it, you will probably find these worthy successors. They're right up there with Wherever You Are and similar tracks. Again, lyrics in the CD jacket would have been superb.

Because I find it irritating that someone had to spend several hours playing with an equalizer to sift out the lyrics to Goodbye, and because of the less-than-best-effort I see in Stars and In Between The Years, I'm knocking off one star. I would still buy this CD even if I had knowledge beforehand about these two songs. Einfeld and Goodbye are strong enough on their own to carry the other stuff on the CD. More to the point - Amazon, please do whatever it takes to get this on Amazon MP3 so that fans can decide for themselves what songs they want and what songs to leave behind.

A very nice chill-out album. Put the headphones on, let the sound wash over you, and the mental images form: Peaceful islands, cathedrals, vast plains, the gentle rocking of a railroad car. It's virtually all melodic, and everything emerges from a warm cloud of reverberation. Vocals, when present, are of the Cocteau Twins school -- you know they're singing, but you can't usually make out what words or languages the vocalist is using.

While the music is relaxing, I also find it emotionally uplifting, even hopeful. Beats drive the music forward, but percussion is not out front. This is sort of the antithesis of the clickety-klunky school of techno. This music is pretty, warm, and inviting. Medusa is the toughest piece on the record, sounding more rhythmic, vaguely discordant, slightly distorted, but still hanging onto its harmonic underpinning. I found all the other cuts quite relaxing.

It's hard to compare Ulrich Schnauss' work on Goodbye to any other band. It almost defines its own genre. It may or may not be to your liking. Listen to samples or whole tracks somewhere, like Ulrich's Myspace page. Hopefully you will like it, and buy it. I did. Very solid throughout. Four stars, well-deserved. It's not at all related to the music I usually buy: jazz, singer-songwriter folk-pop, progressive rock, classical. Finding this new, different music was a pleasant surprise.

A Strangely Isolated Place is one of my favorite albums of the past two years, and this follow-up, for the most part, doesn't disappoint. Unfortunately, there's a couple of "throwaway" songs I usually skip, which cuts the album down to a quick 37 minutes. But I think the songs that do work are better than most of Isolated Place, hence the 5 star rating.

"Goodbye" doesn't sink in immediately. The first few times I listened to it, this album didn't make much of an impression, but upon repeated listens, I discovered much fantastic songwriting, although "Shine", "A Song About Hope", and "Medusa" still don't do much for me.

I'm surprised other reviewers complain about this album's sound quality, since I think, from a sonic perspective, this album's sound is the most masterfully crafted of any of Schnauss's albums. On this album he goes for a certain sound, which some may not like, but Schnauss achieves what he is going for. Many layers of synth blur together in a thick, sometimes distorted, murky wash of sound, with Schnauss's usually prominent drum programming often pushed into the distant background. I figured it was obvious that every aspect of how the mix sounds was intentional, but apparently this intent is lost on some listeners. I'm surprised the same people are not complaining about the cover photo being out of focus.

I think I am going to fall into the camp of a lot of other Ulrich listeners here and rehash what many already said that this album just doesn't carry the same mind opening music that all of his other works do. The prior albums were rich in intelligent sounds, lush melodies, and emotionally provoking moves. This one Does contain some of these elements but its biggest enemy is that it sounds like the album was very very poorly recorded and not even mastered. Bulk of the tracks sound like there was no sound engineer present so you are left with a dozen or so instruments all sounding just as loud as everything else. It sounds bad, I mean real bad. It sounds distorted almost on every track and in addition to that it has this weird under water echoing feel. Bottom line is that this leaves you feeling like behind all of this controlled distortion is a beautiful sounding set of tracks, but its so harshly hidden and distorted that it starts to feel very dissapointing.

Folks, I wish my review was a 5 star like his other albums but... let the buyer beware. If you're a new listener to Ulrich, dont get discouraged and pick up his other phenomenal works. This one is a cautious approach...