Album Review - Reise Reise - Rammstein***** I thought this was going to be a duff year for music, there has been some shoddy work by Avril Lavigne, The Strokes, Slipknot and a heap of other rockers, I've found very few really great bits of new music, until, here at the end of the year there's a barrage of great stuff. Green Day, The Music, Magnum, Mastodon and this.............. Heavy, heavy, sung in German, and laden with the most awesome riffs available in heavy metal today. Rammstein are not afraid to experiment, but they are putting out some of the best strait metal that you can lay your hands on at the moment. Reise Reise is stunning album, following on from the heavy rythyms and crunchy melodies of 'Mutter' and the breakthrough single 'Sonne' they have made themselves into pop stars with the double edged 'Amerika'. With parts of the song sung in English (but only a line or two) Till Lindeman takes what might be seen as a big swipe at American global culture, but at the same time acknowledging our reliance on the USA. That's what he claims anyway, he also says that English speakers won't understand the songs subtleties and the Americans won't get the joke anyway. The first single lifted from the album, 'Mein Teil' (loosely, My Tool) with it's tasteful knife and fork cover and hideous screaming/cutting/frying sequence has certainly caused a storm, moreso in Germany where the Armin Meiwes story on which it is based is still fresh in the memory. Other high points include the utterly bloody fantastic 'Keine Lust' (I Don't Feel Like It) with it's monstrous opening riff (what doesn't Till Like ? You know his taste in lyrics by now, masturbating, buggering large animals, that sort of thing). Los ('Less') with its twanging metallic guitar work makes a good change of pace, 'Moskau' kicks in with more thundering riffs and Tatu soundalikes chanting lyrics in Russian. Morgernstern ('Morningstar') and Stein um Stein('Stone by Stone') have Till at his growling best and the band even manage a love song, well, of sorts anyway, for the album closer 'Amour'. Reise Reise is a stunning piece of work, hard and heavy, very well constructed and filled with interesting tempo and mood changes. Till's lyrics remain fairly dark and obtuse, but who cares as I don't speak any German beyond 'Ein Grosse Beer Bitte' anyway. German could be the perfect language for heavy metal, combined with Lindeman's gravel/well bottom voice even a polite request for a cup of tea could sound brooding and menacing. Musically the rest of the band have taken the evolution of the band seriously, as 'Mutter' was a progressive step on from both 'Sensucht' and 'Herzeleid', so Reise Reise takes the band on another journey. Music in other languages can be hard to get into, I'm a lyric freak myself, I love to know what the musicians think, what they are trying to say, so it's doubly hard to get into a band that don't (and absolutely won't) speak your language. Persevere though, because there is an awful lot to enjoy about this lot. All together now............."Ich habe keine Lust mich nicht zu hassen Hab' keine Lust mich anzufassen Ich hätte Lust zu onanieren"