The eighth album by punk rock group Turbostaat: where there used to be seagulls and mudflats, now there are pigeons and concrete
A young punk stands smiling broadly in a bare corner of a room in front of a battered tape recorder; short-cropped, blond hair, sleek sunglasses with thin metal temples, aged leather jacket over a colourful flannel shirt; trainspotting aesthetic. The photo described above is certainly not a typical album cover motif - and yet it adorns the cover of the new, eighth studio album by the Husum, Hamburg, Berlin band Turbostaat. The man at the centre of the yellowed snapshot? Turbostaat regular producer and sound engineer Moses Schneider in his late twenties; or in his early thirties - at any rate in a period of his life before camomile tea and glossy equipment. Dirt, anger, zest for action, a spirit of optimism, snotty pessimism, an unashamedly grumpy punk spirit - these are the parallels between the photo and the record it illustrates. It is justifiably called ‘Alter Zorn’, sounds more like Stunde Null than a late work LP and - instead of peacefully embracing - rehearses the rudely shaking stranglehold.
Okay, no problem: Turbostaat have never peacefully embraced their listeners on a musical level throughout their existence anyway. There was always more understatement and North Frisian sobriety than charm offensive or cheerfulness, always more longing than comfort, always more noise, confused words and a bearish attitude than good-humoured humbug. Turbostaat music is punk rock with Wadden Sea fog hanging in its lungs - ever since the band formed in the Schleswig-Holstein province in 1999 and a quarter of a century later.
Where there used to be seagulls, Wadden Sea fog and grey expanses, the view of everything beautiful is now obscured by flocks of pigeons, end-time smoggy concrete castles and a goddamn Bismarck statue that sticks its metre-long arse out at the trendy district. ‘Alter Zorn’ looks at the ‘Affenstraße’, at neglected corner pubs where dark shadows pile up, at ‘ruins between glass and steel’, at metropolises full of ‘garish summer vomit’ and shards of mirror that become ever narrower - and only rarely stares at the open sea. What remains for the spongy protagonists of the Turbostaat universe, however, is the piercing loneliness - this furiously resigned feeling of not being able to ‘march along here’. ‘Alter Zorn’ paints a dystopia - a world between November gloom and heat build-up, in which dead swans pile up in the ditch, tanks roll, the air becomes scarce, homeless people hug the street, everyone pays for everything with a card, shivers in leather seats, the mood is in the arse and it's generally ‘really scything’.
Tracklist:
1. Affenstraße
2. Subraum
3. Scheißauge
4. Alter Zorn
5. Nachtschimmel
6. Isolationen
7. Winograd
8. 33 Tage
9. Otto muss fallen!
10. Den Annern sin Uhl
11. Mutlu
12. Jedermannsend
