Here’s a review dedicated to the forumite that turned me on to this curious band; part of a small and dwindling fusion-loving demographic at metalreviews.com that keeps up the demand for the write-ups of records such as this and the assorted Zorn projects that make it onto the site sporadically.

Panzerballett’s Starcke Stucke is a fascinatingly complex, and devilishly clever work of jazz fusion with a very obvious heavy metal/hard rock starting point. A first glance leads to wary eye-rolling. Versions of Smoke on the Water, Paranoid, and even Winds of Change make it on here; rock’s most obvious and overdone standards. We also get what could be regarded as jazz’s equivalent in a rendition of the Weather Report tune, Birdland. It even opens with the fucking Pink Panther Theme.

Fortunately the music is far better than first impressions would lead you to expect. Whilst there are moments where its own clever-cleverness really grates (Friede, Freude, Fussball, based almost entirely around that stupid football-crowd rhythm; I can’t imagine who would ever think that was a good idea), it has features that redeem it many times over. For the most part it is quite ingenious. Hackneyed tunes are transformed; their tonality is curb-stomped and their rhythms brutally molested.

It is these rhythmic maulings that really impress, and give this a heavy, metallic authenticity that it at first seems in real danger of lacking. Sometimes it can sound a little like jazzers not quite capturing the metal sensibility, but at other points its intensely rhythmic chug sounds a lot like Meshuggah did on Nothing. But Panzerballett’s rhythms twisted into brain-mangling time feels that shift so rapidly and with such fiendish intricacy that it makes that band’s most complex works look like they were made by a thirteen year-old who has just learned to play an Oasis song on the guitar. If you listen to this, you will find that there is surprisingly little exaggeration in that remark. The impressive jazz-chopped solos, mainly shared between saxophone and guitar but occasionally allowing a wonderfully sci-fi synth in for Dreamology, give the record a extravagant sound, particularly on Birdland where they are underpinned by a spacey rhythmic haze.

There is too much to go into here in a short review. Each track is complex and requires some understanding. The record’s sense of humour sees AC/DC’s Thunderstruck remoulded inexplicably into a Mr Bungle-esque lounge tune, and Paranoid reworked into an acoustic ballad. This is not to mention the utterly wierd guest-vocal gymnastics of Zickenterror that remind me of an immeasurably more surreal, German, Screaming Headless Torsos. At times, with its repertoire choice and obvious tongue-in-cheek character, it can feel a little silly and self-involved. But instrumentally it is quite mesmerising. It can’t be recommended enough to junkies of technical music, or those that simply value oddness as an ends in itself.