I was always the sort to latch onto those creepy in-between songs that were originally only supposed to be mood-creators or, more specifically, concept-contextualizers. For example, my favorite song on The Melvins’ Stag was “Soup,” two minutes of Metroid-style experimentation that most people, if you ask them, won’t even remember was on Stag. Or, to go back even further to my junior-high days, my favorite song on that first STP album wasn’t “Plush,” it was “No Memory,” that minute-long guitar dirge no one, coincidentally (NOT ironically; learn the difference folks), remembers now. Point being, my cult-classic-never-bestseller attitude hasn’t won me many fans… anywhere, and it’s also left me alone in the dark because the moments I cherish are so often the ones the rest of you discard. And with Clemens Band Denk it’s happening again because my favorite sections of their self-titled LP are the brief instances wherein they get not only weird but contagiously, clinically ‘gone,’ such as “Nebürd ad tsi ettim eid.” This track is but a minute-and-a-half long, with no vocals, and consists of, essentially, a lonely trumpet hovering over an unidentifiable mix of drum-machine churn and warped samples. Yet this is the song, in all its Idea Fire Company glory, that I connect with. And it’s not to say the rest of Clemens Band Denk is lacking. There’s a shitload of gloriously elusive idiosyncrasy to be devoured, akin to Can Can Heads, from the oppressively produced trainride of “Der Zusammenstoß mit der Wirklichkeit” to the No Nos-ish indie-rock/-punk of “Deine Zahnbürste” to the detached, inspirational strumming of “Deine Zahnbürste”… To put it another way, this is a wonderful record, whether you experience it from the inside-out like I do or through traditional, Side-A-to-Side-B means. No matter what language you speak (and I’m pretty sure all these lyrics are belted out in the Austrian mother-tongue), Clemens Band Denk will find a way to communicate with you.
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