Review: Zentrifugal - Tat Oder Wahrheit (1999)

"This CD has great songs. The only thing is that none of the songs are over 4 minutes."
- Amazon customer review of Zentrifugal's Poesiealbum

"What are they talking about?"
"Representing."
[10 minutes pass]
"So what are they talking about now?"
"Still representing."
- conversation between Bastian Böttcher and Kevan Harris during DJ Loris Negro's German hip-hop set @ WNUR, early 2000

Despite the above review's brevity, a careful parsing of its text does reveal a truth about Zentrifugal's first outing, namely that it's more a disparate collection of songs than a coherent album. Knowledge of the duo's roots, particularly MC Bastian Böttcher's origins in spoken-word poetry, leads me to shy away from Poesiealbum's more conventional start-the-party brand of German hip-hop and toward their second album, the subject of this review, which embraces spacy atmospherics and a jazz-inflected groove. (Okay, it's trip-hop. I LOVE trip-hop.) Particularly excellent is "Das Suesse Leben," which overcomes a questionable start of sexual female cooing for an evocation of an expatriate muttering to himself over an Esthero song. In case you're wondering, that's a good thing.

Zentrifugal's defining characteristic is Böttcher's use of the German language, an aspect I am woefully unqualified to analyze. I will say that even listeners who don't know a lick of German, such as myself, can appreciate the smoothness Böttcher brings to his flow using a tongue that normally sounds harsh and jerky, and in which ten-syllable words are common. The hook of "Sommersonne," for example, contains a continuous string of almost whispered on-the-eighths rhyming and thrills like the chill blast of morning air when one opens the front door of an overheated apartment building. Tracks with guest MCs, such as the titular cut, only serve to highlight the difference in Böttcher's approach; while they shout to get their point across, he lays back, relying on an impeccable sense of feel and timing, and giving his vocals an unmistakably musical appeal.

The group's frankly bizarre [PDF] January 2000 appearance in what seems to be the German ConAgra's in-house newsletter translates Tat Oder Wahrheit as "Deed or Truth," which also doesn't mean anything to me. But there's less lost in the translation here than one would assume. Any proponent of the voice-as-instrument school of thought would readily agree that this album succeeds solely on those merits. Regretfully, I do not know of any plans for a third album, or if Böttcher and Negro even still work together. Here's hoping.