KMFDM
Tohuvabohu
Metropolis Records
By Jose Fritz
There was a bolt-head shit storm over the artwork for this record. To me it looked just like the graphics they always use, except for that one year they were having identity problems and spelled their band name backwards. Apparently they had a new graphic designer alter the original work of Brute who did almost all their previous album covers. Mr. Brute blogged a terse and harsh missive of rebuke, which pointed out that the band had changed his original work against his wishes. His color palette and city background were totally different. The world was oblivious; the flaming poo died down in the wake of the non-reaction. Only two fat goth kids cared enough to comment on said blog in two months. Once En Esch left and Sascha let his wife Lucia Cifarelli start singing, the act started to slide. I will note that she looks hot with a Mohawk and that is a rare quality in a woman. Clearly she is marriage material.
Tohuvabohu is the conglomeration of a hebrew phrase renedered in Yiddish as Tohu va bohu. It’s a phrase from Genesis 1:2 meaning “without form and void,” the full line being: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” KMFDM, being the Dadaist bastards that they are, could be taken literally or as a general reference to a beginning, or to be ironic, or to mean nothing at all.
Sascha was always an expert on saying nothing at all. The lyrics to the song “Tohuvabohu” is just a string of random idioms. ‘Fortune always favors the bold, all that glitters is not gold / the fairest flower soonest fades, pride goes before the fall.’ Collectively they are meaningless though each is loaded with all the connotation of their hundreds of thousands of previous applications. I interviewed him in 1999: for the most of the 20 minutes of tape he can be heard repeating himself only saying what I wouldn’t understand. It was about dada, or it makes more sense in the original German.
You don’t need to be fluent in German or Dadaism or own 84-86, their first 12-inch. Once long ago KMFDM was great. They at their peak toured with Ministry and overshadowed them at times. Al Jourgensen’s variable heroin intake notwithstanding, KMFDM was still truly great. Albums like Nihl, Xtort, Naïve, Money, Angst… they constitute the core of their catalog. Even the best parts of MDFMK draw heavily on this era. Only a few tracks here are apart of that schizothemic lineage: “Spit or Swallow” and “Saft Und Kraft” still pack that leather-gloved roundhouse that we’ve all been addicted to for twenty years.
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