KMFDM
Enemy
Metropolis Records
Common wisdom has it that if you were to go through the entirety of KMFDM’s post-2000 catalogue, now standing at 14 LPs give or take a few live and archival releases, you’d probably be able to put together a pretty good album’s worth of songs. Whether you think that’s true or not (either overly harsh, or overly generous), our personal experience as been that every new album from Sasha Konietzko and company has one or two good to passable songs, and a lot of dross. Their new LP Enemy doesn’t buck that trend, but the flashes of their former glory aren’t without their charms.
Moreso than any record in recent memory, Enemy dips into the varying styles that the German/American act have plied in their 40 years of released music. While it’s all to varying degrees of success, the stylistic switch-ups keep the album moving along amiably from track to track. Where the opening title track is a bog standard bit of faux-anthemic chunky industrial rock riffage with a less than memorable chorus and fairly dry production, it’s quickly forgotten when you get to “L’Etat”, a Rammstein-ish stomper that has enough sampled orchestration and big power chords to carry it. There’s actually a case to be made that the final third of the album has the most to offer, including an unexpected but not unpleasant full on dub version of their classic club hit “Stray Bullet”, and a manic bit of sampled and processed guitar instrumentalism on “Gun Quarter Sue”.
That said, it’s hard not to hear some weariness in a lot of the record’s connective tissue. Lucia Cifarelli is undoubtedly the most interesting performer in the band at this point, and does her level best to carry songs like “Vampyr” and “Oubliette”, but there’s only so much she can do when the former is so underwritten, and the latter gets stalled out in staid pop-metal territory, never as fiery as its lyrics would obviously like it to be. It’s especially obvious on “You”, where her voice is pretty much the only thing to hang onto as the song goes through the KMFDM motions, trying her level best to get something workable out of its recycled programming and guitar hook.
Hacking on a new KMFDM album is low-hanging fruit, and for its faults, Enemy isn’t especially worse than anything that has preceded it from the band in the last 20 years or so. That may sound like the faintest praise possible, but then again this is the band that famously headed critics off at the pass with “Sucks” not even halfway into their history; they probably don’t care what anyone is saying about them or their record, and if you’ve stuck with them thus far, you probably don’t either.
