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Thrash Metal: 'Kreuzen For A Breuzen' by Mike Gitter ('Century Days')
Take
a trip to Wisconsin sometime and learn the true meaning of "malevolent
ground." Lots of cheap beer, cheese, porn emporiums by the score, overweight
locals driving pickup trucks and packing shotguns...Ed Gein, the guy whose
cannibalistic exploits inspired such cinematic bloodbaths as Psycho
and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was a local, and gained quite a
reputation for hacking off the breasts of his female victims and wearing
them as he wandered through the backwoods on moonlit nights. Did Ed ever
have any sons? No one knows for sure, but Die Kreuzen are proud heirs to
the longstanding tradition of Wisconsinite mayhem.
Die Kreuzen are shadowy figures rising
from a slime-encrusted Wisconsin swamp, vocalist Dan Kubinski's piercing
scream clinging to the October chill as the band launches into a "dance
of death" that echoes the cryptic finale of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh
Seal (Look it up, budding thrash cinemaphiles-Ed.) Are they pretentious
death rockers? Nope. Die Kreuzen are far smarter than that, maintaining
a fierce independence from stylistic pigeonholing. They pack the gut-squeeze
of Swans and the Birthday Party, the sheer technicality of Metallica and
Killing Joke, and the inventiveness of Wire-not to mention the gloomy aesthetic
of the Sisters of Mercy. Plenty of bands have copied 'em-witness VoiVod's
derivative Killing Technology-but Die Kreuzen are simply too good
for the bulk of you, and deserve Metallica-like stature amongst the denim-and-leather
set.
"We never really surrounded ourselves
with a set of rules," says scarecrow-like vocalist Kubinski, "From the
beginning, we were willing to try different ideas and approaches to achieve
something fairly original."
Kubinski and guitarist Brian Egeness started
the Die Kreuzen ball rolling in 1980 with the Stellas, a band described
by Egeness as a "get drunk and bash the joint around" outfit. Die Kreuzen
took its current form and its current moniker in mid-1981, with the lineup
rounded out by elfin bassist Keith Brammer (who bears a striking resemblance
to Sisters of Mercy frontman Andrew Eldrich) and drummer Erik Tunison.
The band's name, which literally
translates from German into "the crosses," was happened upon by a roommate
of Kubinski's in a German textbook. "We thought it sounded like a great
name," says Kubinski. "We didn't want something with obvious connotations,
with people coming up and telling us we were the thrash-meisters or anything
like that, since we never wanted to be that narrowly defined as a band.
Most people don't know what our name means, and even more don't know how
to pronounce it." (That's Dee-Kroytzen for you phoneticists.)
Century Days, Die Kreuzen's
third and latest LP, rates as the quartet's most varied and best developed
effort yet. "The new record is going to surprise a lot of people," says
Brammer. "It's much better produced than (last year's) October File
and continues the way that one went, with even more song variation. There's
different production styles on each song, and we even use a horn section
on one song. It's definitely a widening."
"Erik came up with the title for the new
album," reveals Kubinski. "He told me it was about the sheer amount of
stuff that goes on every day when your on tour, that you never really know
about. Also, when we were in the studio it was exactly one hundred years
to the day that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph! That was a cool
coincidence."
Hardcore survivors? Hardly. By stressing
musical iconoclasm throughout their career, Die Kreuzen continue to progress
and develop in a fresh and exciting manner. "Too many bands stayed the
same." says Dan. "They all had the same set of rules that they kept blindly
following. Too many bands believed that they had to play incredibly fast
and write songs about Reagan or the trouble down South, and it got old
after a while. We were never really like that."
"Since the beginning of rock 'n' roll,
there have been a number of bands who choose to remain in a certain little
category and don't choose to expand beyond that," interjects Keith. "A
lot of possess a planned obsolescence, because nothing stays the same forever.
I'm glad to see that there's a resurgence of bands doing really cool, original
stuff, like the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer-stuff that actually takes
a chance."
Kubinski and Brammer have also gained
relative notoriety for their work in the Wisconsin-based "industrial" combo
Boy Dirt Car, crashing and banging along the lines of Teutonic industrialists
Einsturzende Neubauten and Chicago's now-defunct Big Black.
Meanwhile, Die Kreuzen are finally
beginning to achieve the recognition they've so long deserved. Last year's
Killing
Technology, by Canadian techno-metallists VoiVod, rings highly of Die
Kreuzen worship, with axeman Piggy demonstrating much the same noise-chording
inclinations originated by Egeness. "They're really cool, nice guys." Brammer
says of VoiVod. "We met them last year when they were on tour, and they
were really friendly and nice to us."
If they are indeed the long-lost bastard
offspring of Ed Gein, the members of Die Kreuzen would undoubtedly be proud
to assume their dad's bloodthirsty legacy. Shame old Ed kicked the bucket
a few years back. He'd probably be a big Die Kreuzen fan.