It’s not easy to lose anyone, especially a friend you had in such a tight knit group. It is certainly a gross feeling whenever a loved one passes, and it’s an even worse feeling having to endure through the grief. However, when grief comes, so can strength, and with strength coming through for Dave Grohl and the rest of the Foo Fighters after the loss of their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, they managed to create one of their best, and most thrilling releases since Echoes Silence Patience ... read more

Here we are, the final Faust record to review. I say that but there is probably a lot more coming soon. That said, this is the last one in terms of right now, so it does give me a lot to reflect on my experiences when it comes to these records and this band as a whole. Been a long journey to get here, but I’d say it has been worth the effort in spades.

Punkt is the first of the archival releases they started back in 2022, in the same year as Daumenbruch. Unlike the Momentaufnahme ... read more

This is so far the last modern studio release from Faust, which makes it quite bittersweet. I doubt this is their LAST last album, hell for all we know next week might give us another album from the band. Faust is wildly unpredictable, which is why they are so charming. The only thing consistent is that they’ve been putting banger after banger out ever since the 2009 release of C'est com... com... compliqué, barring a few exceptions, with them peaking quite strongly with Fresh ... read more

Whilst Just Us was serviceable, it did feel a bit odd after the really great Something Dirty. However, that was merely a bump in the road to the last album of the 2010 era Faust, one that may nearly rival their best.

Fresh Air is a lot different from their previous releases from this decade, and it is pretty evident by the first track, the 17 minute title, as that goes for a more abstract and almost old school Faust type of style. To put it simply, here Faust is moving forward, by moving ... read more

I just realized that I am nearing the end of reviewing all of the Faust studio albums. After this one, I only have three more left to go. It really has been an interesting ride going back and diving deep into these albums. It is weirdly nostalgic looking back, even a little funny, with all of this starting because they decided to put up their first two records on Spotify. However, the ending may be near, but it certainly isn’t here, and so I shall continue on with this light binging with ... read more

It is always nice finding a release from a group you have never heard of, and not only enjoying it, but fully loving its thrill. I am always on the search for new music, and most often than not like what I listen to. Both old and new music resonates within my ears very well, and I can at times develop a small obsession with a record or a particular track. However, on rare occasions, I will be flat out head over heels for an album that I end up loving so much that I fully resonate it being a ... read more

With Faust now getting back into a swing of things with C'est com... com... compliqué and Faust Is Last, and in a decade that thrives upon making experimental music due to the likes of Secret Chiefs 3, Xiu Xiu, and The Mars Volta, it was certainly a good time to be a Faust fan, especially after getting their 2011 record, Something Dirty.
Whilst C'est com... com... compliqué was more of a back to basics for Faust, Something Dirty pushed things into a much heavier ... read more

Riverside has become quite the household name in the prog rock community ever since their second record of Second Life Syndrome. While they may not be as big as Opeth, Dream Theater, Mastodon, and TOOL, Riverside had proved themselves as a pretty grand metal group from Poland. However, in recent years, I have felt they had become less of the giants they seemed to be in their heyday of the 2000s through mid 2010s, with their last really stellar release being Love, Fear and the Time Machine. Ever ... read more

I kind of lied about Faust moving away from industrial music in my review for C'est Com...Com...Compliqué, since they had one more trick up their sleeve in terms of intriguing industrial experiments, with their 2010 release of Faust Is Last being a smorgasbord of noisy rock n' roll and ambience.
This is easily the longest Faust record yet, containing an hour and a half worth of music, with 22 tracks to boot. The album is split into two CDs, Faust A and Faust Z, both being kind ... read more

In the past few years 80s inspired music has become a lot more of a norm, mostly due to nostalgia for such a generation. It is mostly synthwave and synthpop stuff, as that is what 80s music was kind of like aside from post punk and glam metal. We have gotten big bands like Muse trying to be all hip with Simulation Theory. MGMT and Tame Impala’s bigger releases in the 2010s had elements of new wave and more pop focused R&B. This year we even saw a more proggy version of a synthpop ... read more

Disconnected marked Faust’s disconnect (pun fully intended) from the more industrial side of the coin with their sound. Thus, albums moving forward would showcase a new kind of Faust that played a bit more to their olden krautrock roots, but still dabbled in interesting experiments nonetheless.

Their 2009 release of C’est com...com...compliqué is, in my opinion, one of their best releases since Faust Wakes Nosferatu. While they have released a lot of pretty great records ... read more

The last review I made for Todd Rundgren’s music was nearly 2 years ago. Good lord that was a while ago. I still fully believe A Wizard / A True Star isn’t really a good album after all this time, and even stated that I’ll not touch another Todd Rundgren album again. However, conveniently enough I manage to still lay a finger on one of his works due to an album swap, and, well, let’s just say I kinda back peddled on my statements a bit, since now I am fairly interested ... read more

Three years after Derbe Respect, Alder, Faust would expand a bit more on their industrial portfolio by doing another collaboration album. This time, instead of reaching towards the Americas with hip hop, they decided to reach out towards Ireland in pursuit of a very experimental direction, one that, while not as bold as their previous, certainly bode a uniqueness among their past outputs.

This time they collabed with Nurse With Wound (or NWW). Nurse With Wound is a group I haven’t heard ... read more

The fourth Momentaufnahme album, and probably the last as I feel like now the band is kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel with these archival releases.

You can only do so much of these albums before you kind of run out of juice, that’s why this is probably one of the only Momentaufnahme records that I consider to be ‘mid’. Not bad like the first one, but this certainly doesn’t end this little saga of albums with a bang.

A lot of the songs here are pretty alright. ... read more

Didn’t expect to see two more of these Momentaufnahme albums from Faust’s catalog, but I do not quite mind it so much. The more Faust the merrier.

Compared to the second Momentaufnahme, this quite the improved collection of archived songs from the 70s. It’s a lot longer than the prior releases, being nearly 50 minutes, as opposed to the 30 minutes that was shown before. It makes the album have a bit more meat on its bones than before, which I quite like, especially since a ... read more

As Faust entered into the 2000s, the popularity of rock music seemed to wane a bit as hip hop and rap soon took a more center stage in charts and performances, with acts like MF DOOM, Kanye West, and Eminem gaining loads of popularity. It obviously wasn’t the end of the world for rock music, as what many older folks would have you believe, it just was that rock wasn’t the big shot genre as it once was back in the mid to late 20th century. Now, Faust most likely saw this, and decided ... read more

With the 90s ending, Faust wasn’t quite done with the decade just yet, and so amongst a sea of releases such as Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, Botch’s We Are The Romans, and Blur’s 13, we would get the rather intriguing suite of Ravvivando.

This record would show a stylistic direction that the group would go through into the 21st century. Their 90s output had been a lot more industrial, most likely due to the golden age industrial music seemed to garner within the late ... read more

In the realm of minimalism, many artists have crafted unique symphonies within their own space of expertise. From Reich’s droning repetitions, to Arvo Pärt’s holy machinations, minimalism, despite its repetitive nature, has showcased a level of singularity within the artists it houses. I sort of get intrigued when I see an album with the minimalism genre attached to it, especially with more modern records. So I certainly was quite interested in Philip Glass’ solo ... read more

What is it with this year having bands coming back after years without any new releases? We got a new Sleepytime Gorilla Museum record, the seventh Bondage Fruit album, and now a new recording from an Italian prog band that only released one record 50 years ago.

Semiramis is one of many prog bands that would only make one record back in the 70s, much like Opus-5, Crack, and Cervello. Some of these bands have either come back for a live show or two, maybe an archival release, or in rare cases ... read more

To describe Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is to take the scene of Rock In Opposition, and convert it into Metal In Opposition, or MIO, if you will. Much like Kayo Dot, maudlin of the Well, and Hoplites, SGM is one of those big shots of avant-garde metal that I have fallen in love with in recent memory. Very weird, and surreal music that feels as though I am metamorphosing into a creature after I listen to one of their albums. Their recording outputs happened quite a bit in the 21st century, at ... read more