TUGEND - Optimism is for the weak - CD - 11 tracks -
Somnambulant Corpse Recordings

An album that carries a quote from Ernst Jünger cannot be fundamentally bad, it's the least one can hope, and this album won't contradict me. Tugend is an American project that takes its inspiration directly from the second world war, using period samples, set to a background of various sound collages, menacing loops, repetitive and harsh percussions, with an industrial atmosphere that remains revenchist and intact. Indeed, one thinks of Les Joyaux de la Princesse, mainly for the period sound collages associated with a harsh and uncompromising sound, but one can also hear influences ranging from Turbund Sturmwerk, Non, Der Blutharsch to Darkwood of Von Thronstahl and more recently A Challenge of Honour. The atmosphere is set immediately, martial and solemn. An ambient music that intensifies crescendo its experimentations, resulting in an impressive sonic orgy, a cathedral of apocalyptic and desperate sounds. Sirens wail, machineguns rattle, airplanes cover the ambient noise and explosions round off the carnage. The album invites the listener to a voyage in time, to countries where metal and blood are king, filled with an almost indecent and voyeuristic nostalgia. War remains one of the major themes for some formations, not because of a particular attraction to bellicose tendencies, but more by fetishism and by the strong symbolic connotation engendered by violence, in respect of all those useless deaths, to understand human destiny, to avoid the unavoidable… The titles of this album talk for themselves, "Dresden", "Sacred Blood", "Panzer Marsh", "Purification", "Persecution", and also "Dreams". Critics often reproach these bands their more or less political connotations, often wrongly, to which Tugend replies: "we act politically in order to fulfil our spiritual aims; we act spiritually in order to fulfil our political aims".
A record that is equally cold and sentimental, as hard as it is respectful. A very nice ambient industrial work, and a total success for a first album. Turgend should be followed very closely, and I'm willing to bet on the future success of this act.
Excellent, strongly recommended !

Stéphane F.
Sumer 2002

Contact :
Somnambulant Corpse Recordings
2442 nw market street #266
Seattle, Washington
USA 98107
web : http://www.somnanbulantcorpse.com