Composed elegance and lucent peace of mind: is the tone in which NEWMEN answer the question about originality in postmodernism. ‘Soft Ware’, the Frankfurt band’s second long-player and fourth release altogether, serves up calm and complex compositions between wave, krautrock and pop. In collaboration with producer Elias Foerster (Sea Moy, Still Parade) they created a smooth-running album consistently centred around the idea – or the illusion? – of the new. Retromania and neomania, analog and digital, backward and forward – this record almost loves to blur contrasts and creates a new visual angle with each of its 13 tracks.
Observably calm the quintet unmasks the tricks of modern consumer culture, peels away labels and adds another link to the value-added chain by reducing the mechanisms of mainstream to absurdity, dance-step by dance-step. Not without a wink NEWMEN named their new album ‘Soft Ware’ – in reference to form and content of current times.
Because ‚Soft Ware‘ is always also ‘soft ware’, meaning gentle, soft and at the same time somehow intangible. Music as a product also cannot escape this development. Paradox? Maybe. But more topical than ever – and additionally immensely fascinating.
This scenario characterizes the album’s stylistic finger print, which develops a fascinating profile by ironically disrupting content and form: catchy arrangements form and intimate relationship with weightlessly drifting instrumental tracks, through which Newmen consciously live out their passion for contemporary pop music. The repetitive moment of NEU!, the immediacy of early KRAFTWERK, the easiness of AIR – all that and more can be marvelled at on ‘Soft Ware’. An album that manages to unite intuition, contemplation, zeitgeist and timelessness to a bold statement.
