The Notwist

Shrink
Zero Hour, 1998

When The Notwist became popular in the US and Australia on the back of a favourable review of their fifth album Neon Golden in Pitchfork, some people dismissed them as just another folk band who'd discovered laptops. That description was half true. To the ears they may have sounded like just another folk band with an electronic bent, but they also happened to be a German folk band with an electronic bent. Which meant, in line with the strange habits of European musicians, that they had started playing as a metal band, dabbled in punk and grunge, then stumbled upon laptops, post-rock, jazz and finally folk.

The Notwist were formed in Weilheim in southern Germany in 1989 by brothers Markus and Michael Acher with Martin Messerschmidt. Their first two albums, The Notwist and Nook, were tremendously loud detonations of noise inspired by European metal bands and the various hardcore, punk and indie sounds coming out of the US in the early '90s. After being joined by keyboard programmer Martin Gretschmann – who has since made some ten electronic albums under the moniker Console – they released their third album 12, which hinted at the style of hybrid indie and electro pop they would go on to record.

It was on 1998's Shrink, the album before Neon Golden, that The Notwist hit their stride. Among other things it is one of the greatest and uncredited inspirations for Radiohead's reinvention as an experimental pop band with Kid A, which was released two years later. The first track, 'Day 7', begins with three minutes of a stuttered electronic beat set to an art-house collection of chiming and scraping sounds. When the song proper kicks off, it hurtles straight into gorgeous pop territory as Markus's vocal melodies dance around the tinkerings of Gretschmann. The interaction between those two drives much of Shrink – see especially the fragile glitch-pop songs that wound up re-imagined on Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac – but what gives the album its true soul are those sections where the band delve into freeform jazz and rock over the top of the electronics. That probably makes it sound like some kind of terrible muso wankfest, but it's not. No, really, it's not.