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Le Mur — Keep Your Fear Away from Me
(Bandcamp no#, 2023, CD / LP / DL)

by Henry Schneider, Published 2023-11-06

Keep Your Fear Away from Me Cover art

After another four years, German art rockers Le Mur return with their fourth release, Keep Your Fear Away from Me. Whereas their previous albums conjured images of Joy Division and Chrome, Le Mur now takes the music in a new and exciting direction. Sometimes jazzy, sometimes ambient, sometimes edgy, but mostly progressive rock. For this go around, they collected musical motifs from Camel, The Doors, Miles Davis, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Hawkwind, Ozric Tentacles, Black Sabbath, John Coltrane, Anathema, Kyuss, Tool, Ulver, UNKLE, and Mogwai and swirled them altogether to create a new Le Mur sound that is unrecognizable from these influences. The album consists of four long tracks: “Praeterium: ...The Past Will Be Perfect...,” “Praesentium: Today Is the Day / The Beauty of Now,” “Another Life / Burning the Tree / I See You,” and “Futura: ...For the Puzzles of the Future.” The first track is a dreamy slow jazz art rock track that grows on you over the course of its 15 minutes, augmented by sound bites from an old professor’s lecture. The second track changes direction with bird song, a singing child, male vocals, and eventually some melancholy strings to close the track. The high point for me is the fhird tack where Le Mur really cutd loose with some aggressive prog rock jamming, which seques nicely to the fourth track with an older man now speaking. Janine crafts the melodies and plays some very tasty bass riffs throughout; Matthias’ guitar licks are supreme; and Georgios’s drumming and overall band management is outstanding. This is quite a nice album that shows a band’s maturing sound.

Filed under: New releases, 2023 releases

Related artist(s): Le Mur (Lemur)

More info
http://le-mur.bandcamp.com/album/keep-your-fear-away-from-me

 

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