Das Ich – Lava
Genre: Dark Electro
Year: 2004
Year I discovered it: 2005
I have an interesting story on how I discovered Das Ich. I used to get all my new music from Rasputin Records at Pleasant Hill, California, and someone accidentally put this album in the metal section. It was early 2005 and there was no YouTube yet, so I had no way of knowing what I was getting when I bought an album, I just had to go off whether or not the cover caught my attention. See kiddos back in them days, before we had all this Pandora and Spotify malarkey, we had to rummage through record stores, find a CD with a cool cover, band name and song titles, and just hope the CD sounded as good as it looked. Believe me, I bought a few albums that looked like they were going to be awesome but then sucked. But you could usually depend on whatever you picked being in the correct genre! At least until some foolish employee who knows nothing about underground music makes a mistake like putting Das Ich in the metal section. So I saw the CD and it was in German, had a bunch of bald guys covered in red paint on the cover, and as an extra selling point, had a sticker on the front which extolled the virtues of the CD with a positive review. I still have the sticker on the case today. “Featuring twelve mind-blowing tracks of classical orchestration mingled with dark electronics and Stefan Ackermann’s growling vocals, Lava will quickly earn a place in the hearts of fans of dark electro.” So, this was going to be kind of like German Dimmu Borgir, right? Or at least German The Kovenant, like black metal with orchestral backgrounds and some synths? What’s “dark electro”?
When I first put Lava in my CD player, I was baffled at the lack of guitars in the very electronic opening of the first track, “Uterus”, but as I continued to listen, I started to like it. I suppose this was the beginning of the end of my metal phase, as this album became a gateway into darkwave, EBM, synthpop and Industrial (a transition which as mentioned earlier had already been set up by Mortiis' The Smell of Rain and even earlier with Kraftwerk). The singing on this album is smooth and fast, almost like German rap, but in a raspy voice. The music though is what really makes this album a timeless classic in my eyes. It’s just so damn good. The energy of this album flows like lava and crystallizes. Like the Lava Reef Zone in Sonic & Knuckles, if you know what I’m on about. I had never really heard anything quite like it at the time. It can be catchy and danceable, it can be dark and brooding, but it maintains this smooth, beautiful melodic energy throughout.
“Uterus” is the kind of song you could dance to at a gothic night club, like The Castle in Ybor City, Florida. As I listen to this track again, I can see myself relaxing on one of their comfy sofas in the back, bobbing my head to the beat while smoking a tasty vape and watching the attractive go-go dancers go about their dances in their sexy devil costumes. It’s a song you could either dance or relax to. “Fieber” is less ambiguous as a danceable track. “TrΓ€um mit mir” (“dream with me” in English) almost sounds like “toy mit mir”, which I always found amusing for some reason. I listened to this song enough times that I can actually sing along with the fast-paced German, even if I don’t know what every word means.
The energy slows down with “Meine Weige”, creeping along like one of those slow but unstoppable lava flows you see in Hawaii. It’s a song that deals in opposites. “Liebe hass, gut und bΓΆse”, “tag nacht, warm und kalt”, “gelb, rot, schwarz und weiss”. It’s a good song for someone learning German. After this relaxing song, the energy picks up again in “Schwarzer Stern” (“Black Star”), which is an awesome name and one I’ve swiped for a mix tape title. I always thought they were saying the name of their band throughout the song, but looking at the lyric book they’re actually saying “dass ich”, but it’s emphasized each time they say it. “Ich reite auf dem Schwarzer stern” translates to “I ride on the black star”, which is just an awesome lyric. The energy keeps up through the next track, “Vulkan” (“Volcano”), an appropriate song title for the album, fits right in with the theme. “Mein kuss ist ein Vulkan” translates to “My kiss is a volcano”, so he must be one heck of a kisser. The singer also repeats “Ich will deine seele,” which means “I want your soul”. What does he want that for, I wonder? Sounds a bit threatening.
“Sehnsucht” is slower, and a haunting track. No relation to the Rammstein song of the same name of course. It brings to my mind visions of a scorched landscape after a volcanic eruption, with a slow-moving wall of lava engulfing everything. “Sehnsucht” is a really cool word by the way. It roughly translates to “longing”, but there’s a little something extra to the word that English can’t capture. Like “longing”, but much deeper. There’s a reason more than one German band has a song with this title, let’s just say. The next song, “Seele Tanzt”, is a good song in its own right, but perhaps due to the misfortune of being placed on the album after “Schwarzer Stern” comes off as an inferior version of that song in some ways, because it has a very similar sound to it, but I don’t like it as much. A wannabe. It sounds like he keeps yelling “LET ME THROUGH!” for the whole song. I could look up the lyrics and see what he’s really saying in German, but eh, why spoil it after all these years? Maybe it’s a song about road rage. The next song, “Tot Im Kopf” (“Dead in Head”) is another song that never made much of an impact on me. It would work well on its own on a mix tape or playlist, but is overshadowed by the other songs on this album. That seems to be a common problem on albums that end up with more than 10 songs. Even Ministry’s With Sympathy kind of has this problem.
The title track “Lava”, however, is distinctive enough to be in its own league. This is one of the tracks with background orchestration. I know he’s not singing about this, but when I listen to this song a music video plays in my head of a ninja in ancient Japan sneaking around and kicking some ass. Like this would be good background music for a video game about ninjas. Like Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven or Revenge of Shinobi, something like that. I don’t know. I should probably translate the lyrics and see what the song’s really about after all these years. It’s probably about walls of slowly advancing lava destroying a town or something. And after this song we have “Urkraft”, the darkest song on the album. This song sounds like the apocalypse, with its dark orchestration. Like a vision of how devastated the world must have looked after the asteroid hit 65 million years ago, throwing ash into the atmosphere and blocking the sun out for years causing an eternal winter and setting off volcanic eruptions all over the world, and killing the poor dinosaurs. This is a scary song to meditate to. Which is why you should try it sometime.
As with The Smell of Rain, my copy of this album ends with some remixes. They’re actually good remixes though. I wouldn’t say better than the originals, but still good. We have the Asche Remix of “Sehnsucht” (apparently there’s an alternate version of this album called Lava: Asche where instead of red paint the band members are in yellow paint and every song is a remix. I still don’t have this version.) It’s more upbeat than the original, and a worthy remix. The next song is “Vulkan” as reinterpreted by the band Wumpscut. This one’s a bit weird, I don’t really like it that much. But I guess I don’t hate it either. I just don’t usually listen to it when I put this album on. Meh.
Anyway, after having my musical tastes permanently altered by this album, I sought out other Das Ich albums. I have most of them now. I’ve been waiting since 2006 for them to come out with a new album that isn’t just a “Best of” collection. Sadly, as with The Kovenant and Kraftwerk, I’m still waiting. The band still tours though. I even got to see them live at The Orpheum in Ybor City on July 3rd 2018. That has to have been one of the best concerts I’ve been to. Stephen Ackermann and Bruno Kramm are quite spry and agile for their ages. If you want to see it for yourselves, I’ll embed one of their concerts here. This isn’t THE concert I was at, but it’s a concert from a few days earlier. So this is very similar to the concert I was at.
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