The Devil, You + Me
After a lengthy hiatus-- one that has found indie increasingly enthralled with clubland crossovers-- the Notwist finally follow Neon Golden and Shrink with an album every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors.
Though around since 1989, The Notwist only broke into the slightly larger indie-world consciousness with 2002's Neon Golden. The long gestation was worth it: Golden is one of the most accomplished, moving, and elegiac electro-pop albums of the millennium, like Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See A Darkness with synths. The…
Six years since 'Neon Golden', and it sounds as if the whole time The Notwist have been trapped in an Ikea catalogue, so clean and unchallenging and packed-up and European is 'The Devil, You + Me'. Tom Whyman is not a happy man.
After all that time spent developing, or (to be more kind) bouncing from place to place, beginning with scraggly post-hardcore (The Notwist, Nook) and then moving to relatively streamlined and occasionally melodic post-hardcore (12) and then abstract electronics (Shrink), the Notwist delivered a smart and song-oriented synthesis of the organic and synthetic on Neon Golden.
In the half-dozen years between new studio albums from Germany's the Notwist, a lot has happened in the music world.