Faust

CD version. Faust has been around for over 40 years. Since 2007, the line-up of the Krautrock legends has comprised founding members Jean-Hervé Peron and Zappi Diermaier, the English musician James Johnston, founder of the brutish blues rockers Gallon Drunk and long-standing member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, plus the English painter, filmmaker, author and musician Geraldine Swayne. On Something Dirty, the creativity and musical ideas of these four personalities coalesce into a perfect symbiosis of sound. It is at once hypnotic, repetitive, melodic, exhilarating, psychedelic, menacing, Dadaist and ethereal. Johnston's guitar saws its way through Diermaier's archaic beats, harmonically enriched by Peron's powerful bass and Swayne's psychedelic keyboards. Time and again, Faust revisits their avant-garde roots, experimenting with voices and unusual instruments. (A flamethrower and goat hooves can be detected in their arsenal of sonic sources.) Best of all, however, Faust have succeeded in reproducing the raw energy and roughness of their live performances on Something Dirty. Breathtaking stuff! "There is no group more mythical than Faust." Thus wrote English musician and eccentric Julian Cope. Which says it all really, neither the habitus nor the music of the six-piece Hamburg group was easy to grasp. While some lauded Faust as the best thing that ever happened to rock, others dismissed them as shameless dilettantes. Their collage of Dadaism, avant-garde rock and free improvisation radically divided opinion. When the first LP was unleashed on the world in 1971, Faust were very much the prophet in his own land, as the saying goes: few were interested in listening to their music - in Germany. Not so across the Channel: this is where Faust's career really kick-started. These monoliths of avant-garde rock sold 100,000 copies of their album The Faust Tapes. Exactly 40 years after their debut, Faust has come up with another archetypical album: inspiring, innovative, unpredictable, anarchic and Faustian. Something Dirty is a definitive milestone in the long history of this world-famous musical institution from Hamburg.