Through the first half of the '70s, German band
Faust
were in a state of nonstop discovery, expanding the parameters of their wildly experimental sound on every album and helping to define the burgeoning Krautrock movement in the process. After churning out four groundbreaking records between 1971 and 1974, the band regrouped following a dishearteningly unsuccessful tour by getting right back into the studio to work on what was intended to be the follow-up to their relatively pop-minded 1973 album
Faust IV
. The group holed up in
Giorgio Moroder
's Munich studio for ten days tracking their new material, but when the project's financial backer disappeared without paying the bill, the album was quickly shelved and the bandmembers went their separate ways until re-forming in the '90s. That fifth album went without official release for close to 50 years before appearing as
Punkt
on the massive 2021 box set
1971-1974
.
The seven pieces that make up
don't follow any direct stylistic line in
's evolution, and much like most of the band's other albums, it approaches change drastically from one song to the next. Instead of the flirtations with melody and structure that happened on
, however,
has more in common with the scattered euphoria of the group's third album,
The Faust Tapes
. The ominous, repetitive groove and muttered vocals of opening track "Morning Land" are as close as
gets to conventional songwriting, but it still veers closer to the wild-eyed, percussive jamming of contemporaries like
Can
. From there on, the album is largely instrumental, exploring soft jazz ambience on the piano-led "Schoen Rund," proto-punk attitude on the snarling "Juggernaut," and cross-wiring synthesizers, tape cut-ups, and live percussion elements on the murky "Prends Ton Temps."
reaches a fever pitch somewhere on "Knochentanz," a lengthy and forceful improvisation where processed trumpet, moody guitars, and rocking drums all gel together to sound like
Miles Davis
sitting in with psychedelic Swedish commune
Traed, Graes och Stenar
. A perfect continuation of the frenzied tear that
were on in their earliest phase,
paints a different, slightly darker shade of the unpredictable brilliance they found on their first four records. The band have been credited with laying the foundation for the ambient, industrial, and noise scenes that followed, and
backs those claims up even further. If this was the level
were operating at just before their initial collapse, we can only imagine what they would have created had they kept going straight through from that point on. ~ Fred Thomas