This Room (Reprise) – K4LT (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I don’t want to jump to cultural stereotypes, but this is the sort of music that the German creatives do much better than anyone else. That robotic drive underpining this latest track from Berlin’s K4LT, that motorik sound, as it was known, is the same one that a whole scene, known as Krautrock, was based on back in the day, and that was, in my humble opinion, German musical avant-gardening at its finest.

But it is more than just that beat. The Room also captures that cold, clinical sound that immediately evokes the mystique and bleak landscape of Central Europe, not as it is today but as we remember it in the stark Cold War era.

And yet, for all its coolness and Teutonic sense of the aloof, it is a wonderfully accessible song. It is a song that looks you straight in the eye and begs (or perhaps threatens)you to get up and dance, to join in its shamanistic primal-techno ritual.

This meeting of worlds, the old and the new, the digital and the analogue, the cool dance-fuelled otherness and the infectious groove, all help drive home the sense of confusion and alienation that lay at the heart of the lyrics.