Zeitgeist

There's little that the dreamy, new age intro vibes to Schiller's "Zeitgeist" LP can do to take the edge off of the über-German spoken word bits that hover atop of them. It's just not a pretty language, and the only reason that Western ears bought it from mega-synth legends Kraftwerk was because the cold steel timbre of those voices meshed so well with the perceived notion of machine-speak. Those uncomfortable interruptions aside, the Schiller duo of Mirko von Schlieffen and Christopher von Deylen do a fair job dabbling in the hypnotic organica of Enigma. When the beats are finally dropped (on "Liebesschmerz" or "Lover's Pain," for instance), however, the most the duo manage to pull off is a pale and less dramatic approximation of Bedrock's "Heaven Scent." Taking their name from the German poet Friedrich Schiller, the lyrics translated for the sleeve read like pedestrian, high-school fare ("Love is like a fever/it overcomes us and disappears"). While most of the tracks here are passably produced and logically thought through, the resulting material is far too bloodless to spend much time poring over.