Mood Taeg – Anaphora

Shameless in their revisiting of krautrock’s heyday, Mood Taeg owe a bit to Can (on the rhythm side) and a whole lot to the tasty, optimistic splendour of Cluster and Harmonia. The basic building blocks are gently stimulating rhythms and intricate, scintillating motifs on guitar and synths. The latter is hinted at in the very title of their second album. An anaphora is a lexical repetition attached to variations (think of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) with a pronounced and immediate psychological effect—the comfort of the familiar facilitating openness to the unknown. One can say the same not only of their compositional techniques but also of their expansion on the ideas from mid-’70s thinking-person’s pop from Germany, taking the familiar a bit further. On that note, where their debut Exophora used the human voice very discreetly and for purely textural purposes, Anaphora bears extended snatches of archival chatter of artists and activists, to more clearly express their worldview. Nothing too conspicuous, mind you. That’s in keeping with their preference for subtle complexity over sheer mass, something that makes Anaphora an unobtrusively invigorating listen.