I'm not one to judge a book by its cover, but that doesn't hold true for music. If I don't know a band but it has appealing artwork on its CD cover, I'll give it a go. It is because of this character trait, dear reader, that I stumbled upon this week's selection. While scrounging around the mail bin, I came across a brown and red-highlighted picture of a young girl with a butterfly in her hair: a butterfly with a skull. Awesome. Couple that brilliance with the fact that it was a CD named Heimlich by a band called 17 Hippies, and how could I not pick it?
But it doesn't end there. The first sentence of the press release that accompanies the album asks, "What do you get when you take one ukulele and a Persian hammered dulcimer - played by a former heavy metal drummer - and add to that an acoustic Turkish take of the hip hop classic 'Apache'?" After reading that my mind was literally exploding from the possibilities. This was either going to be a masterpiece or a horrible disaster.
Had I found that diamond in the rough that this column was created for?
Not necessarily. What I did find, however, was an album quite possibly created by individuals with more drugs coursing through their system than Syd Barrett, Mick Jagger and Amy Winehouse in their collective heydays. Heimlich is a schizophrenic, genre-jumping collection of tunes that refuses to stick to any accepted musical notion, namely that it should sound at least somewhat coherent.
The opening track "Schattenmann" blasted through my speakers with all the power of a incestuous banjo-picking redneck. If country music had an equivalent to speed metal, this is it. Plus, it's in German, so aside from fearing the ferocity of the music, I also feared the ferocity of a language that I do not understand and have always feared. Nothing against speakers of German - and I in fact have just been given proof that it can be very beautiful - but the language often sounds harsh. Finally, there's a soundtrack to all those late-night heroin binges, whether real or imaginary.
The band's - which, by the way, isn't actually comprised of 17 hippies - take on Sugarhill Gang's "Apache" is actually listenable, primarily because it is instrumental and sounds like it was created whilst its creators were sober. A time change is instituted, pretty much burying anything resembling the former song, but I can't stand that tune anyway, so I'm okay with that.
I think it's fairly obvious that Heimlich is not the buried treasure I have been so eagerly seeking. It is, in fact, the complete opposite; it's the rough, one of a number of horrible discs that make this journey so arduous. But in true packrat fashion, I'm holding on to this disc, because you never know when you're going to get the urge to do yourself harm by popping some Ecstasy, viewing Lindsay Lohan's awful Marilyn Monroe pictures and listening to some Germans whisper country-tinged psychedelia into your ear.
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