A reverse drum loop, very hollow, Franz Treichler singing "Our house…is a house that moves…just like the ocean…" Strange sounds and samples and loops, deep echoes, a sense of sheer, vast space. It all repeats, further tweaks at points, all still very alien and not quite right. Then Treichler says something like "It rains!" and the riffs are deployed. Thus begins the Best, Biggest Rock Album of 1992, all without one guitarist anywhere nearby. Genius, really. No ifs ands or buts.
The Gods did what for them was a strangely untypical move on this record. After redefining the possibilities of a very very European aggroavant thrash over three albums, lyrics in French, classical stabs and Eurometal snarls liberated for their own use, they decided to go American and see what would happen. Among other things, that meant "Gasoline Man," a song that ZZ Top could have written, except it was better. The humor was blacker, the tech killed everything in sight, and bar-band blues became a supersheen apocalypse. Add to that such things as samplings of Guns 'n' Roses on "The Night Dance" and the very intentional Doors references throughout all twenty minutes of "Summer Eyes," after having heard all sorts of (frankly bizarrely misplaced) Jim Morrison comparisons over time and deciding to do something about it, and I've heard of worse ways to chase after the dollar, or in this case more what it stands for (and around that time they were fond of talking about empty deserts and pools of energy and power deep in the sands, all with a modernist bent, the technoshamans of rhetorical dreams).
And as always it rocked, and so damn hard and so damn well. The way the title track wrapped around a crushing, brutal riff, demanding the only possible reaction, jerking forward and back again and again, complete surrender, Uwe's drums pounding away and Al's sampler rendering legions of fretbenders useless, there's so much oommph and before in the silicon. Or the way the whoosh led into the opening sampleriff on "Skinflowers," followed by its counterpoint sound and then the relentless, snaky crawl forward, Franz demanding something from you, you know not what, not to mention the whining crunch of the break getting on your nerves just in the right/wrong way, and the way you think it's ended…but not really.
It's still wonderful to realize quite what the Gods did and still do throughout their all-too-unique career, finally making so many different rock tropes merely grist for a processing mill to create something different -- the links to hip-hop are of course obvious in this regard, but everything is still done differently even from that, to an extent, trying to make more strangely unified things from all sorts of disparate sources, like if a metaband was doing the playing, if you will. An ultimate band of dreams and desolation and more.
And when it all ends with the sliding way Treichler sings "Undulate…" over music doing just that, and followed with his blasted cry of "America, America! The flowers need water!", somehow what would otherwise be mere observation from the outside becomes something a little more cutting at that.