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Thomas Brinkmann, "When Horses Die"
Just over a year after Klick Revolution, the dazzling, spiritual sequel to 2000's much lauded Klick, the veteran boundary-pushing German techno producer strives—and invariably fails—to capture a claustrophobic personal experience. A risible counterfeit masquerading as artsy, post-millennial singer-songwriter fare, this atypical record exhausts its pretense almost immediately and rarely recovers from the obviously nonexistent heft of false malaise.
While a magisterial figure in the minimal electronic music world, and despite his apparent intentions, Thomas Brinkmann is no Alan Vega. Posturing like some disaffected trust fund nihilist on "Uselessness" amid otherwise stark, synthetic atmospheres, he instead calls to mind Richie Hawtin, another techno visionary whose laughable down-pitched vocal delivery on Plastikman's extraordinary Closer threatened to derail its obsidian majesty more so than his subsequent goofy emo hairdo. With few exceptions to the pervasive mediocrity, When Horses Die is meretricious tripe, insincere down to its very packaging. Here, Brinkmann takes pleasant enough studio outtake quality tracks, mutters some obnoxious lyrics over them, and audaciously expects the results to be taken seriously.
A sub par vocalist, Brinkmann relies on the words of others to aid in this industrial-tinged non-stop platonic cabaret trainwreck. Traditional songwriting is hardly the man’s forte, as evinced from directionless opener "Words." Brinkmann fumbles with canned fury midway through "Birth & Death," a flat attempt at Trent Reznor's type of aggressive dark pop. Clearly, mimicry appears to be his sole strategy. For "It's Just," he slurs like a third-rate Teutonic Leonard Cohen, desperate to attain even an eighth of that performer's unconscious cool; on the title track he practically parodies the unparalleled John Balance. Venturing backwards into a musical chasm far from in his comfort zone, Brinkmann naturally appears bewildered and disoriented, grasping wildly at influences without actually building on them. This distressing display would almost make him pitiable if these tracks weren't so execrable.
When Brinkmann terminates the aforementioned "Uselessness" mere seconds before what should have been a somewhat redemptive 4/4 assault, he indulges a sadistic inner narrative, an unspoken masturbatory rhetoric that intentionally and needlessly insults his core audience. Nobody can fault the man for veering away from the staid techno template, as he has done so creatively and brilliantly on the fearlessly academic Klick records. Yet that seven minute track's final false build-up of sequenced crash cymbals shows an unnecessary, unwarranted disdain for any fan who chooses to join him on this feeble diversion.
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