• achtergronden
• DE 7EVEN
• video's
• agenda

ernaast

Schneider TM | Zoomer

The calm light illuminating future thoughts. Warm songs rolling over the lover's skin. Smiling
CD, City Slang/Labels

Tekst: Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Publicatiedatum: 15 december 2002

At the end of the year, cleaning up, one sometimes finds an album fatally neglected; it slipped under the radar of consciousness, you know of its existence, yet with the wealth of great music in 2002 it just kept escaping. Normally I would discover Zoomer somewhere midway 2003 and then call it something like The Great Lost Album of 2002, but luckily at the threshold of the new year it can still be put in the perspective of the now, and this perspective is that of the self-conscious modern pop record. Zoomer defiantly, knowingly and with a surplus of intelligence demands to be futuristic pop which, we tend to forget, should nowadays be read as the sound of now, the 21st century. The album cover is pretty clear about it, too: what normally would look like the earnest portrait of an artist gets updated by having Dirk Dresselhaus wear a pair of messy, and one would think fairly realistic, VR-glasses (the implication: Schneider TM sees, and by association, hears things differently).

Zoomer must be seen as the European version of the Justin Timberlake album. Of course they don't sound alike, they come from totally different worlds yet somewhere they share an intent, which is to blend the experimental with a pop sensibility. Schneider TM is quite happy to let the base of his music be built on the pillars of different forms of pop modernism; although buzzing with hints and references three massive influences carry Zoomer: Beach Boys, My Bloody Valentine and Panasonic (a group that Dresselhaus has rightly praised on many occasions as a great soul band.) Opener 'Reality Check' is sun-drenched techno pop with heavenly treated vocals and the first sign that Schneider TM has taken on the challenge of last year's Daft Punk and Mouse on Mars albums and fuses them into one track. From there the album carefully leaps from plateau to plateau to grow in intensity: the lovely 'Frogtoise' sporting the most obvious Beach Boys influence, 'Abyss' being a sensual techno song and 'DJ Guy' the prerequisite sarcastic song. All those songs create a pleasurable meshwork of state of the art dance production, with intricate drum programming and seismic bass combined with lovely touches of acoustic guitar. The first real hint of My Bloody Valentine guitar shreds appear at the end of 'DJ Guy' to fully bloom on the corrosive '999'.

Not everything here works, although 'Turn On' is the only real problematic song with its overt display of clever Beckisms. If there is an overall criticism to be leveled it should be the choice of language; even though Schneider TM has a feel for almost erotic, round-sounding one-liners, one sometimes longs for Zoomer to be sung in German, the mechanical/romantic language par excellance. But these are just speculative footnotes that hardly detach anything from Zoomer's considerable charm.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/schneider-tm/zoomer/2128/
Meer Schneider TM op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/schneider-tm