Review Summary: Rudy's lost his way.
In these modern times we aren't left with many new industrial acts that are simply incredible. Ranging from EBM, to aggrotech, to pure industrial new bands, can’t seem to find their niche, capitalize and create that profoundly great album. For this reason alone we are left to hope and dream that our current juggernauts can pick up the slack and release a quality album when the time comes for them. Something tells me Rudy Ratzinger didn’t get that memo. His newest effort,
Schrekk & Grauss is sadly 10 more tracks of uninspired, empty, electro-industrial songs that aside from the few seconds of sparse intelligence show nothing more than Rudy’s inevitable downslide.
Schrekk & Grauss is released a mere year after
Siamese, which was released a year after
Fuckit and so on all the way back to 2004. Before 2004, :wumpscut: releases were spaced out and therefore were more well thought out and better constructed than the current ones have been. The main problem with this album lies in the fact that it sounds like one giant song with a few interesting moments here and there. The album title and title track loosely translate to scary and horror, and if this is Rudy’s attempt at a move to the terror EBM or harsh EBM territory, consider it a failed attempt. While the title track is one of the best, if not the best song on the album. The rest of the songs just sound like normal :wumpscut: material.
As previously mentioned the title track “Schrekk Und Grauss” is the strongest song you’ll find in the first half. It has everything that Rudy is known for including the strong, heavy electro-industrial beats mixed with the distortion. The chorus of the song is what makes the song worth listening to. This is the closest thing on the album to harsh or terror vocals and when mixed with the high pitched sirens that squeal over the pounding, visceral beats, it makes for one of the best industrial songs of 2011. It’s almost as if he put all of his effort into creating the ultimate title track and lost any ambition he had for the rest of the album. The second half of the album is much more strong music wise also. Songs like “Wumpelstilz” and “Jiddish” have very good beats and samples built into them, but the vocal performance by Rudy leaves a lot of room for improvement. “Jiddish” for example, would have the propensity to become one of the albums strongest songs if it weren’t for the looped vocal track for six minutes. Instead it just becomes a mash of eerie samples mixed with dark electro beats and another wasted track.
It’s difficult to nail down what Rudy was aiming for with this release. With the peculiar album title it seemed like we might’ve been in for a more scary and exciting adventure, but nevertheless we weren’t, and here we stand with another lackluster :wumpscut: release for the books. It’s not such a disappointment that this album in particular wasn’t a success, the disappointment lies with the artist himself, and his decision to merely follow rather than to be the leader. Has Rudy just lost his concentration or has he lost it completely?
