Udo Lindenberg embraced the 1980s a lot earlier than most people -- he was predicting some of the decade's more worthwhile fascinations a good five years before the calendar actually turned the page. By 1984, however, he was all but treading water, with
Gotterhammerung the take-it-or-leave-it consequence of his apparent disinterest. Of course, now it's known he was simply waiting for the rest of the German scene to catch him up before racing off on another tangent entirely -- the Max Headroom video favorite "Germans" was just around the corner, while this album's ferociously punk-flavored "Hello DDR" nods toward another of his consuming passions, as
Lindenberg's vociferous attacks on the Berlin Wall moved from musical agitation to direct political action. In the meantime,
Gotterhammerung burbles along on the latest synthesized technology, with plenty of meaty electronic rhythms and dance-crazy quirks, and just the occasional traditional rocker (the churning "Narkosegespenst," the poppy "I Love Me Selber") to console his earlier audience. By the standards of the time, of course, it's a great album; its only real fault from a modern point of view is its inability to realize just how ruthlessly the "1980s sound" would date. But very few people did figure that out, and you pay the price today with every new retro compilation that's released. Or, maybe he did figure it out. "Familie Kabeljau," with its freakishly tango-ed rhythm, looks at the rise of Atari, Space Invaders, and microchips from Taiwan, and neither likes what it sees, nor welcomes the future that they're ushering in. Chillingly,
Gotterhammerung closes with "Der Grosse Frieden," an icy lament for the end of the world. ~ Dave Thompson