Wolfgang Flür: Times
(Cherry Red)
CD | Vinyl | DL | Streaming
Although his status as a former member of Kraftwerk’s classic line-up will forever mark him out, Germany’s Wolfgang Flür continues to travel to the beat of his own electric drum. Robert Plummer checks out this year’s model.
Lovers of old-school electronica have been ill-served in recent years by the undisputed grandaddies of the genre. Under sole surviving founder Ralf Hütter, Kraftwerk have been reduced to a mere digital conservation area, a stately ancestral home of techno-pop. But while the original family franchise is content to perform retreads of past glories, estranged relative Wolfgang Flür, now on his third solo album, has other ideas.
Flür has beef with his former band, whose music he has described as “minimalistic and cold”. (Seasoned Kraftwerk fans might reply, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”)
The Apfel hasn’t fallen far from the tree, though. Flür still lives in Düsseldorf, formerly home to Kraftwerk’s seminal Kling Klang studio, and his music is also imbued with that city’s unique vibe.
In fact, opening track Posh thrusts us squarely into the world of Düsseldorf high fashion, already renowned for its models and showroom dummies. This time, the focus is on the consumer, as we follow a high-maintenance fräulein on a shopping trip down “Luxury Lane” (presumably the Königsallee, where the city’s fanciest stores abound).
We’re told that she “can’t ignore a window pane” and “covets the bling-bling”. But rather than just observing, Flür strikes a moralistic note of the type that Kraftwerk always studiously avoided: she is “callous with an empty heart”, making “selfishness her strategy”.
That sets the scene for what follows, as Flür allows himself all manner of fascinating indulgences that Kraftwerk’s conceptual rigour would never have tolerated. The robots are still on the march, only their ties are loosened and their collars unstarched.
Sonically, Times is denser and more deeply layered than any Kraftwerk record. The synthetic bump ‘n’ grind of Sexersiser is where the album most resembles the work of Flür’s ex-colleagues, with its digitised female voice offering transactional coupling by, er, Numbers. Elsewhere, however, the listener is taken on a sonic journey with instrumental passages that venture well beyond Kraftwerk’s deliberately restricted palette of tones.
This reaches a peak during the seven-minute odyssey Global Youth, where processed vocals and shimmering sequencers come together in shifting cloudbanks of sound. Long-time Kraftwerk collaborator Emil Schult and Yello’s Boris Blank are on board for the ride as the music surges towards an altered state, a kind of kinetic dream-pop for androids.
Schult and Blank are not the only guest stars on the album, which also features Detroit techno legend Juan Atkins, ex-New Order bassist Peter Hook and many more. For the most part, you wouldn’t know they were there unless you saw their names on the sleeve. They are there to serve Flür’s vision rather than standing out in their own right.
If the album has a weakness, it’s a lack of truly memorable tunes. There are no rousing choruses, no Ohrwurm melodies. But it’s still a landmark release by one of electronic music’s true pioneers – and one that successfully transcends the weight of the past to offer a fresh and forward-looking collection.
Follow Wolfgang Flür on Instagram and Soundcloud
Preorder the album here
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All words by Robert Plummer. This is Robert’s first review for Louder Than War.
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