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Review: 'Ja, Panik'
'Die Gruppe'   

-  Label: 'Bureau B'
-  Genre: 'Industrial' -  Release Date: '30.5.21.'

Our Rating:
Die Gruppe is the first album for seven years from this Berlin based Austrian 4-piece Ja, Panik who are known for bi-lingual German English songs. Although the album was recorded in Lockdown most of the songs were already written before the world fell apart.

The album opens with the industrial noises of Enter Exit that soon give way to an almost folk prog song with some cool brass that comes in every now and then to accentuate the almost spoken vocals that are in German mainly with a few words of English to accentuate that we are all hostages to language.

Gift is an avant industrial tune built around a central drum and bass part with the clarinet taking it somewhere else as again the vocals switch between German and English, this ends up sounding like a weirder Oomph! Tune before an outro of crackling surface noise that might make some vinyl listeners worry the record needs cleaning.

Memory Machine begins in a gentle way with the vocals to the fore over a sparse keyboard and bass backing with the odd noises slowly coming in making this almost like an experimental ballad, every time it threatens to really go mad the music just falls away back to the sparse beauty of their Memory Machine.

What If is very bass heavy slow and ponderous asking the eternal What If question, what If you and I don't live on the same planet.

On Livestream appears to be the soundtrack to Ja, Panik's livestream, you can only imagine what filth is on that livestream, as you look through your fingers at what unfolds to this rather libidinous slightly jazzy sleazy techno pop.

1998 takes us back to the infancy of the social media age, back when we spent time in chat rooms and online forums in the days before twitter and facebook and they are looking forward hopefully to find a way into a better future, this is spare and gentle going back to a world before the paranoia of always being online, waiting for that dial up connection to load a web page.

The Cure wears its red lipstick smudged across its face as they try to find The Cure for what ails them over strummed acoustic guitars that are less itchy than that rash they have, that might have been caused by it being a Friday when they were in love with the wrong person, as it switches to English and becomes a song about The Cure for capitalism being more capitalism.

Die Gruppe is slow atmospherics that questions medicine and scientific certainty with a pulsing beat asking about all the secret groups doing all sorts of worrying things.

The Zing Of Silence has a marching beat and strings that the message in the lyrics is slowly and carefully tells us about The Zing Of Silence.

Backup seems appropriate as my wi-fi is currently down while I write this review waiting for the fault to be sorted, as this quite gently stirring song about not having any back up for seven thousand three hundred days, while they try to predict when the end of the world might be, I wonder when I might get back online and be able to post this review.

The album closes with Apocalypse Or Revolution which asks which one are we headed towards, if it's the latter what would be the aims of the revolutionaries and how long have they been plotting and planning it for, as lets face it the Russian revolution took decades. As this tune swirls and builds it sounds more like a new dystopia rather than a brave new world that will have off sax and buzzing sounds at all times.

Find out more at http://www.bureau-b.com/ja_panik https://www.facebook.com/japanik


  author: simonovitch

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