This is a hard album to find information on, and it took me several months before I made sure that this was all new material, and not some sort of best of or compilation. Having become a huge fan of Joachim Witt’s in the past 6 months, I was eagerly anticip ating the arrival of this album, and when it finally did arrive I was very excited.
However, right from the start, I had some problems. The biggest of which: the album doesn’t play on computers. It even says it right on both the cover of the album and the face of the CD, “Auf PC/Mac nicht abspielbar” or, in English, “Won’t play on PC/Mac.” In this age, where most people use MP3 players and computers to play their music (I certainly haven’t used my discman in more than a year) it’s almost unheard of to have no way to put this on your player. Luckily, (and here is certainly a bit of promotion) thanks to Roxio music ripper, I managed to dodge around this and get it on my computer, with some work trying various programs and methods. I was crossing my fingers that after all this work I’d be rewarded with another killer album in the vein of Bayreuth III or Pop, and at first I thought I had been right. The opener, Eisenherz, is as good as any of the tracks from his later albums, with a good beat and slightly heavier than average (for Witt’s work up to this point) and even for the first track or two afterwards, however by the time the CD is halfway finished, there’s a feeling that there’s something missing.
This album to me feels like a cross between the first two Bayreuths, with a sense of the pop/light rock elements from II and the electronica elements from I. In the end, I feel a little torn by this album. I enjoy it, and it is fairly regularly in my playlists, but it just doesn’t grab me the way some of his work does. I’d still recommend this to any fans of Witt, especially his later work, but not as highly as Pop or III. My final opinion on it is fairly simply summed up: It’s good, but it’s not great.
Score: 
Hompage: Joachimwitt.de
Reviewer: Paul Gifford
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