Diät – Positive Disintegration – Album Review by Killian Laher

German band Diät draw inspiration from the heavily mined territory of post-punk.  This collection is their second album, and it’s fair to say we’ve heard variations on this teutonic, austere music before, but not quite like this.  Here we get eight swift, short, sharp chilly blasts over half an hour.  It opens with We, with the singer spitting out lyrics in the manner of Joe Casey from Protomartyr over angry blasts of guitar, anchored by a taut as fuck rhythm section as the guitar threaten to overpower the song.  Hints of goth creep in here and there, Foreign Policy has serious hard-riffing energy, ripping along like early Sisters of Mercy covering the Stooges.  The programmed percussion on W.I.G.T.D.W.M? adds further fuel to the goth revival theory.

This album features the best damn song called Dogshit you’ve ever heard with a glorious, Eastern-sounding trashy riff, prominent bass and sub-Eldritch vocals.  The one departure from the formula is Missed The Bus which builds slowly on a bed of down-strummed guitars, threatening an explosive climax which never quite arrives.

It’s easy to lapse into cliché when describing a band like this, black-clad rakes living in East Berlin etc, and it’s possible that these songs are a little… immediate, and won’t reveal hidden depths a few weeks down the line.  You might think you’ve heard this before but probably not quite as succinctly and viscerally as this.  Music like this only makes sense at this, darker time of year so don’t waste time, get it from here.

Track List –

1. We
2. Foreign Policy
3. W.I.G.T.D.W.M?
4. Disintegrate
5. Dogshit
6. Only My Own
7. Missed The Bus
8. Opfer

We