“Life is beautiful, but the world remains shit. Our music may not start a revolution, but it can do its part. In that sense.”
– Gunnar Schroeder
In heavy metal these days there are more and more young people doing old things in a convincing way – under the UNIVERSUM25 banner, on the other hand, well-matured musicians are doing something new under a new flag…or. newfangled. The all-star project with Michael Robert Rhein (IN EXTREMO) on the mic also gathers Rupert Keplinger (EISBRECHER, ANTITYPE), Pat Prziwara (FIDDLER’S GREEN), Gunnar Schroeder (DRITTE WAHL) and Alex Schwers (SLIME) in its midst. A truly motley bunch of well-known sound generators, which by and large come from three universes that are only partially compatible: punk rock, medieval rock and the new German hardness.
What connects the five musicians from different worlds and their debut album “Universum25” is the disillusionment with our twisted and irrational world, which they compare with the band name UNIVERSUM25 with the laboratory experiment of the same name from 1968. An equal number of male and female mice were brought together under ideal conditions to investigate their reproduction behavior. What came out of it and was easy to guess: total chaos, social collapse, cannibalism, anarchy – and finally, on the 1789th day, the extinction of the population.
The extent to which this cruelly acquired knowledge can also be transferred to human behavior and its global social prognosis is revealed by the texts, which are almost entirely socially critical and not stingy with bite and sarcasm. Said lyrics, not dissimilar to punk rock, hold the mirror up to mankind in an unembellished way and bring their message to the man or woman in a pictorial and eloquent way. “Hard food”, for example, goes with the “ideological arsonists” of our time (populists, conspiracy theorists, reality deniers, …) and uses an entertaining mixture of plain text and Cuisinier language (“Poor theses middle-aged”, “Phantasm in one’s own brew”, “angry bourgeois cuisine”, “everything thoroughly weighed, the truth quickly turned right side out”).
“We are waiting” denounces the rule of money and the associated social injustice – the fact that a bulging wallet opens (too) many doors for a few, while the majority of society “In the queue” stands. “The Corpses of Time” describes hypocritical and indifferent behavior towards refugee crises (“and for every cry for help there’s a lifebelt made of lead”) and the TON STEINE SCHERBEN cover “Der Traum ist aus” (“The dream is over”) builds a bridge from resignation to hope – just as relevant today as it was then.
Lots of ramblings about the lyrics, which are undeniably the album’s great strength. Musically, the aural hodgepodge essentially moves on the terrain of the electronically enriched NDH (cf. EISBRECHER) and (punk) rock, whereby the latter, in addition to isolated tracks such as “Die Neue Zeit”, particularly represents the lyrical foundations and the vocals have an unmistakable IN EXTREMO note added. You can’t complain about the result and thanks to the powerful production, the whole thing is definitely good for a boisterous shuffling in the flow of the hard rhythms. Only the fact that apart from the really brilliant TSS cover and “Enug” there is no real catchy tune on board at least casts a small shadow over the socially critical all-star entertainment. All in all, however, a clean thing that is definitely worth a visit live.