Where there is a crater, there must have been an incident. Something has hit or erupted where there is now silence. In 2012, Messer spit their feverish debut "Im Schwindel" into the bubbling enthusiasm for punk from Germany and grew to become a defining voice in the post-punk revival of the decade. What was still rampant on the last two records "Jalousie" (2016) and "No Future Days" (2020) is now more firmly established on "Kratermusik" and at the same time provides security for further expeditions.
The individual ideas are now more sharply contoured than before, Kratermusik is an album in the literal sense: each page is a different image, a different scene with different characters, held together by a cover, a world of motifs, a sound that is dense this time, but all the more detailed.
Elsewhere, voices dissolve: Pola Lia Levy, who has been a close friend of the band for a long time and is just getting started with her new band Dews, provides harmonies that blur with the rest of the band in the initially gentle, then increasingly rousing "Im falschen Traum". In the space dub finale "Am Ende einer grossen Verwirrung", she joins Joachim Franz Büchner in a spirited singsong. What sounds comforting here seems torn in the polyphonic mirror, although not necessarily sinister - but similarly fascinatingly ambivalent as Mille Petrozza from the legendary thrash metal band Kreator, who is allowed to cut through the wispy chorus at the end of the wave epitaph Grabeland with a few English-language lines.
Messer thus remain ambivalent, questioning and searching, especially when it comes to war and peace or the future of the planet. The movement is already in the title: the "knife-related word" crater, says Otremba, "is ambiguous, a word that makes it clear: you have to relate to it. It's a sharp-edged, rugged word." There is always the potential for an explosion in a crater; the next war lurks in peace. However, the new record is a typical Messer album in its emphasis on aesthetics, even in its usual transgression of what post-punk can be.
This band has never sounded more diverse, their reference system remains inscrutable. At the same time, the pop tides are once again washing up a (new) Neue Germane Welle, but Messer remain committed to their own cycles and are in constant transition: never completely dissolving metaphors, always illuminating motifs anew, relating sounds to one another in a different way.
