Blumfeld, Verbotene Früchte

First of all, a big "fuck you" to Blogger for terminating diacritic support in the title field. The name of this album is "Verbotene Früchte".

Moving on.

Once again, Blumfeld have failed to top L'etat et moi, their 1994 classic. They have however succeeded in surpassing their three intervening albums, Old Nobody, Testament der Angst, and Jenseits von Jedem. Those three albums largely jettisoned the impassioned, glittering rock and roll of their predecessors for a kind of bland, nylon-strung AOR folk-rock, although there were moments of quality (some of it woefully overproduced, but still) strewn about.

On this, their sixth album since 1992, they plow ahead in their pop furrow, but this time, mercifully, they've brought some actual songs. If there are cornball moments on Verbotene Früchte, they are washed out by the greater degree of inventiveness in melody and arrangement present here. It appears also that the band have retrieved from their past a fair amount of post-punk musical technique that they seemed, on Old Nobody, to have forsaken. It's still fairly AOR-folky, but at least now it's substantially fiercer.

The sitar crap on "Schmetterlings Gang" is still pretty inexcusable, though.