The story of how I discovered this album is a little bit of an odd one, so I thought I'd share it, since it relates to my opinion of the album...
During one of my endless searches for German-language music sometime around 6 months ago, I downloaded (among a large batch of other albums) Sternenstaub. At the time I guess I wasn't impressed enough to put it into immediate rotation, but I must have liked the tracks enough to intend to come back at some point, since I put it into my "to save" folder. Well, I completely forgot about it until this past weekend when I was spending some time clearing out my downloads folder. Since I wasn't sure even what the music was by this point, I put on the first track, to see if it was even worth listening through before deciding. Well, I was blown away. Apparently when I downloaded this album I wasn't really in a techno place, but the album (and that song, in particular) have been in near constant rotation for the four days since then.
Enough backstory, on to an actual critical analysis of the album. First off, the strengths. The guys from Melotron (am I the only one who keeps typing Meltotron?) have the ability to create very catchy, pulsing beats which just make you want to start dancing. When they're at the top of their game (as on the aforementioned opener Kein problem) they're surprisingly good. While the lyrics may not be of the same cleverness or beauty as some bands in modern German music, they are catchy, they fit the music, and they do have their moments ("Jeder weiss der Kanzler ein Luegner ist" is a personal favourite)
Unfortunately, the quality of some of the tracks don't carry through to the whole album. Melotron are somewhat maddeningly inconsistent on this album, as the album seems to decline steadily in quality from the high point of the opener. Second track Folge mir ins licht works almost as well as the opener, and the steady, petty female vocals definitely add to the track, but by the time the album reaches Der kosmonaut there is beginning to be a noticeable decline in the quality, and while it rallies a few times near the end, overall the feeling I was left with once it was over was one of mild disappointment.
After reading my opening paragraph and the one right above this you might get the impression that I have a somewhat contradictory opinion of this album. Not so. What my opinion basically boils down to with this album is fairly simple: It starts great and declines from there. It's a catchy futurepop album that would appeal to fans of dance music as well as modern pop music, and it's a solid enough release for me to start trying to track down more from the band.
