The title of this German language track from one of the early Blumfeld singles translates as Other Me, so it makes sense to post it after Just Comes Out That Way by Bugjuice which similarly dealt with themes of split personality and behaviour switches. It’s German rock but from the Post punk school rather than the Heavy Metal one. However, Blumfeld’s achievement is that Anderes Ich is imbued with greater warmth than you might expect from my previous description of it, while the band also find time to include one of those rock cliches that you never seem to hear anymore: the rock time signal, which leaves the listener questioning when the track’s actually going to end. When you hear it, at around 3:15, you may find yourself thinking, “At the third (down) stroke, the time will be....” There’s even a telephone conversation dubbed in underneath it during the last 30 seconds making me wonder whether Blumfeld were recording something for use by German Telecom’s version of the Speaking Clock.
I like the track for its mix of contrasts and straight-faced absurdities. Peel may well have been drawn to play this because it was distributed on the Zickzack label from Hamburg. He reckoned that the Traum:2 single was the first record he’d received from Zickzack since the early 1980s and he was delighted to have confirmation that they were back although, “They may have been releasing records all the time of course and I just haven’t known about them.”
Blumfeld continued to release records up to 2006. They also recorded a track with one of the best titles in all 1990s music, perhaps one of my favourite titles in the history of recorded sound. It’s an MOR toe-tapper called Status Quo Vadis. Who said Germans had no sense of humour?
Video courtesy of TheCousin666
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