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The Clauberg Opera
- The Death Of This City
“This record was not made to be played quietly. It is not an answer. It is a question”
This album is not what you expect. The startling artwork adorning the cover of a solitary figure, head smashed against a blood smattered wall and the name Clauberg Opera written in Gothic font - a name forever linked with the atrocities of Auschwitz - might give you the image of some by-the-numbers metal band out to shock with some gory artwork and a controversial name. Nothing could be further from the truth. Clauberg Opera and their album are so exceptionally unlike anything you’ve ever heard before, bar nothing. It’s because “The death of this city” is the loudest, biggest, meanest fuck you in music right now. The band play masked, their identities hidden and disguised behind bandannas, scarfs and the eccentric punk stage names J.Mayhem and Sidney Sorry.
“The Death Of This City” offers nothing familiar, nothing for a new listener to latch onto. No lyrics, No verse/chorus song structure, no catchy hooks or ‘Killer riffs’. It casts the listener totally adrift in unknown territory with no comfort, grabbing you by the throat and forcing them to pay attention. It’s an all out attack on the senses. Its claustrophobic atmosphere is brought about by the way it was recorded, one tiny room and three band members. (“You’re genuinely pissed off when you can’t even move.”) It was recorded with no technical tinkering, a tape recorder and only one open microphone recording everything meaning that nothing has been gone over and repeated more then twice in the whole record. Nothing’s perfect, the imperfect is what is so startling. Compared to the sleek and well-produced products being pressed, this is the truest rock and roll album in years, refusing to be restricted or tied down by a passing fad or convention. It’s rough and raw and passionate, imperfect, harsh and thrashy with parts on the verge of being swallowed up the sheer volume and ferocity of the music.
Unrelenting, yet strangely beautiful.
“It’s what’s missing from music at the moment,” comments Mayhem, “the mistakes.”
The unprocessed recording while helping express the conditions and ferocity in which it was recorded is also part of the bigger Clauberg Opera ethos. The band, intrigued by the output of the ‘Dogme 95’ filmmakers, a group who set themselves guidelines on how their films can be made, set about giving themselves guidelines and rules to what could and could not be done on “The Death of this city” and then working to make the best music in and around these self imposed restrictions. Yet you never get the impression that any of this is gimmicky in any way or that the album is being strange just for the sake of it. The result of these rules is the most unconstrained and human recording.
“We try to make things hard for ourselves,” they explain. “We tried to reinterpret the Dogme 95 movement for music. There are rules for that movement and people ask how can you make a film free of conventions when you’re setting rules for yourself? Experimental now has become a sort of by word for having either a synth or a keyboard player. I like the irony of setting rules for yourself and still make naturalistic music.”
Another accomplishment resulting from the boundaries the band set themselves in an album totally devoid of any lyrics. Sidney Sorry and J Mayhem, through their bands before the Clauberg Opera had become well known for their lyric writing skills and decided to once again make it complicated for themselves by taking this element away. Far from revealing itself easily through lyrics the album relies solely on the instruments and soundscapes to tell its story.
“We set out to soundtrack the apocalypse and thought of the most likely natural disaster, a flood and then wrote ‘The coming of the waters’. Most people don’t listen to the music, they listen to the lyrics. It never used to be about the lyrics with Mozart! Then it was all about the music and performing soundscapes. In the last hundred years the attentions turned from music to the lyrics, so lets go back to how it was. We’ve done that now and accomplished what we set out to do, a lot of our new songs have lyrics which is the next stage”
Winterkill is perhaps the most talked about track on the album. When the track hits its first peak it’s so severe you wonder if the opera could manage to play their instruments any louder or with more unrestrained, unchecked violence.
“The best way to die would be taking it too far on stage with the Clauberg Opera. We can’t get the violent side of us across yet, it will come across when we play live. It’s do or die. If you’re not going to go all the way then there’s no point.” The juxtaposition of corporate consumer jingles, exploding raw guitar fuzz and pounding drums is a striking element of the song and when the “always coca-cola” jingles give way to what sounds like the heralding of the apocalypse it conjures up images of crowds rioting against the constant barrage of mindless corporate jingles and advertising, here showcasing the banal against the brilliant. You can feel the anger, the fury and resentment here.
“When you go and make something that actually requires people to think about it, it pisses people off. It’s surprising how many not just negative, but violent reactions. When you put a coca-cola sample on your most popular song (winterkill), people don’t like it. They just don’t want anything political on controversial”
There’s also little point in denying that it takes a while to get into. It hasn’t got the instant ten second appeal you’d find in your average set of rock songs. It wasn’t until my third listen that it all started to make sense. Yet the rewards you reap from persisting with it far outweigh any pleasure you’d get from something more accessible. Inside the sleeve the album carries a message to all the doubters and haters, “Fuck you, we have won” a bold uncompromising message to show the hardship and anguish in making this incomparable album. The blood sweat and tears that it took to bring this compelling dream to reality. “You get to a point where what you’re doing is more important then getting a reaction to it. You can make it like what’s on the cover on the NME this week or you can just go with it. Some people are going to be violently opposed to it and some people are going to be violently for it”
“Rock and roll on any level should be about violence, it should about anger and it should be about honesty, and that’s what we are. It’s supposed to be real and alive. We do what we feel”