Rome :: Berlin EP (Cold Meat Industry, CD)

(10.18.06) The latest addition to the neo-apocalyptic martial folk scene is Jérôme Reuter, whose initial record under his Rome moniker is Berlin, an EP tease for his full-length to be released later this month. Filled with decrepit idealism, these six tracks are filled with the fulsome atmosphere of tragedy, the lament of civilizations which have failed.

“Once we learned to speak we learned to fail / We turned white and cold, like lovers,” Reuter intones in the opening track. A ragged hurdy-gurdy moans in the background, cranked by the ghosts of dead soldiers and their abandoned wives. “Like Lovers” gives way to “The Orchards,” a melancholic peregrination through a bomb-shattered grove of burned trees. The narrative voice, flush with fatalistic Romanticism, whispers a sorrowful ode to the passage of love and life from his city and country. “We are left to left to wander,” he sighs. Nothing more than hollow shells bereft of a history and a future.

Martial electronics swirl through “Une Autre Vision,” a smoke-tinged threnody of the forlornness of the war zone. In the beginning, the
vocalist has a radio signal to accompany him, but that disappears into a groaning undulation of wind. Echoes of lost squads calling to each
other and a mysterious piano playing from a hidden chamber behind a half-wall float through the sonorous fog. “Clocks” is a torpid
funereal march with heavy brass, slow drums and a tubercular poet intoning a death poem as the procession crawls out of the bombed city. “Wake” exhorts the sleepers to awaken, but the radio loops it ransmits go unheard in the empty city.

Berlin is a brief litany to the devastation of both the soul and the city — a series of linked pieces that chase Death through ruined buildings and corpse-lined streets. The songs of Berlin are crepuscular in their fascination with the despair of the survivors. Life goes on, yes, but what sort of life? So filled with sorrow and a harrowing emptiness. “There’s no peace, no truth, no pause, no end,” Reuter recites in “Herbstzeitlose,” the final track of the record. “There will always be guilt, impurity, despair. We are afraid. We are not what was intended. We do not know what was intended. We shiver, shudder, tremble…”

Berlin is out now on Cold Meat Industry.

• Cold Meat Industry
• Rome