L'appel Du Vide - Metro

You ride northeast over the Zwickau hills. The leather reins cut into your frozen hands as hot, sour heartburn burns its way up.
Metaphysical hangover sweat pricks through your skin pore by pore, through a faded coffin tattoo on your forearm. Your tired feet in your father's NVA boots clasp the flanks of a steaming, gray Appaloosa, or is it just the tricked-out Simson S51?
It doesn't matter, because actually it's your very own Mind-Machine, in which you wander through the ruins of self-knowledge, following the call of the void. To Chemnitz - the San Francisco of the very common man.

However, you won't be greeted by Bernd Spier's simple Flowertime, but by asbestos, Eternit and, above all, the cracks that run through them.
It is precisely there that the songs on L'Appel du Vide's first full-length "Metro" condense, defying every vacancy, into a 9-story monolith of post-punk, death-rock, synth and darkwave, which - once climbed - allows you to look beyond those genre boundaries.
A shimmering black Jenga tower of (East-)German Angst and uncompromising introspection. So much more genuinely faltering than a Campino wants to make the middle of society believe with his rehearsed sideways wobble dance, it leads you away from the low-hanging fruits of epigonal (post-)punk swindles.
Towards the blossoming flowers of true music connoisseurship. They've bitten into it and stayed with it, prospected and sorted, read the liner notes and, above all, listened to the many records. Opened the drawers and left them open.  

Singer René complains without airs, without pointing fingers and immune to any zeitgeist clamor, first into his own heart. The guitar saws, clangs and screams with hunger and yet is sated. The rhythm section growls, rattles and bangs its way straight into the abyss, from which analog synths also emerge here and there to catch their breath. In general, you can hear the instruments breathe, that's how honest the sound is.

Guitarist Flatty recorded the band in early 2023 at Studio Gloom, Chemnitz. But there's not just Saxony and the too often invoked, musty roots of those who got stuck. There's Detroit, Frisco and Los Angeles. Manchester, New York and Portland. And just as Poison Idea's "Feel the Darkness" begins (to use a reminiscence after all), "Metro" ends after 37 minutes of playing time - with naked piano.

In between: a kinship in force and attitude, but without metal and posing. Just Power and Void. And in the saddlebag an old photo of the sea, grainy, black and white and yet reflecting all colors.