Siriusmo: "Einmal in der Woche Schreien"

Faultless, standalone vinyl singles are every record collector’s wet dream, so when an artist builds his entire career out of them, is there a need to change tact? Moritz Friedrich has been dropping twelves for over a decade now, steadily building his reputation as Berlin’s nu-disco gold mine: if you want to get a German dance floor shaking like there’s been an outbreak of brain herniation, you only need to drop one Siriusmo A-side. Now, after ten years of nothing but killer singles, he’s finally made the switch to full length LP, testing to see if his “Max Headroom sucks helium” routine can stretch to fill an entire album. Looking at some of his track choices and seeing entires such as “Red Knob,” “High Together,” and “Feed My Meatmachine,” newcomers might be forgiven for thinking Mosaik is the soundtrack to a new Tinto Brass film. Looking at the taster and seeing the sheer quality of beats, keyboard rifles and super-engineered chop-pop, you quickly learn how the Siriusmo sound is just too damn good for Euro-porn. Too many hooks for a start.

Firedrich’s most prominent hook here is the much-blogged “Einmal in der Woche Schreien,” which should translate to “Scream once a week” if my Modern Languages schooling still holds. With the help of some scratchy keyboards and a pile of radioactive synths, Friedrich high-tunes his guest vocalist’s singing until it’s somewhere between opera and ducklings. The result bears a resemblance to both weird shit from the ’80s (namely this) and someone dropping nerve gas at a Katy Perry concert. “Einmal”‘s final trick is that it’s surprisingly warm, and should quickly convince fans that Siriusmo’s still got his charm: his knack for marrying ultra-processed disco crunches with cartoon sound effects goes on, hinting all of Mosaik‘s tracks might be as strong and as spastic as this one. I hope they are, because then we’ll be entering a new run of faultless, standalone albums.