THE TRANSLATED PRESS RELEASE: “There is no sea on the new Kreisky album, no sunken island kingdom and no Indiana Jones diving for it. And yet the title Atlantis is a good key to get to the bottom of the new pieces. Kreisky are looking for the mystical and the lost, for the remains of their own youth, for ideals adjusted to death, for the irrevocably lost.
People break in these songs, people are broken, people isolate themselves in order not to be broken, or else — and this is a clear novelty for the Grand Masters of Grant in his openly displayed optimism — they cannot be broken. “If someone says what you are doing, the last shit is — say: It’s my dirt!”
Atlantis is the musically and lyrically most sophisticated and relational record of this singular band to date. There are no protracted slogan jingles on it, but rather meticulously polished short stories in text, sound and arrangement. To be found exemplarily in the soundtrack-like impressionistic title opener, in the coming-of-age epic Lonely Planet or in the nasty advance single ADHD.
A little miracle of a song that only Kreisky can bring about is Kilometers of Wheat. The guitar sounds like an alto saxophone suffering from burnout, singer Franz Adrian Wenzl declaims a slightly crooked story of arrogant adolescence; a refrain built close to the hit implodes just before swaying and turns threatening. A piece of dream logic that exemplarily shows how close the evil and the stupid, the clever and the banal always are with Kreisky (as in real life!).
The characters drive us towards us in the next few pieces, without language or chance. The isolated accident (?) victim in Downhill Slalom Super-G who seeks consolation but finds skiing. Or the boy in A Case For The Youth Welfare Office who will never get anywhere. Unfortunately, his father has to tell him that honestly.
This is followed by the Krautrock monolith My Tongue Is Empty, actually a fitting final piece in the tradition of other brute Kreisky final pieces — if the band wouldn’t let the album end quite differently. Atlantis ends with When Someone Says in an almost sacred piece of self-empowering pop. In its last lines the piece expresses the musical self-image of the band: “If someone says do it like us, most do it — say: No, I can’t and I don’t want to afford it!”
In a popular cultural environment in which a lot is interchangeable and almost everything is highly professional, Kreisky are at least one thing: namely, Kreisky. And therefore irreplaceable.”
