Digipak version of the out-of-print album with 28-page booklet.
As is sometimes the case, ASP’s multitude of fans initially reacted to this milestone in the band’s history somewhat sceptically, because in stylistic terms, ‘fremd’ considerably turns up both the rock factor and the ambition factor. No wonder that some in the scene were at first a little... wary of this work, which tackles to a greater extent than before the sense of being an outcast and of humanity going astray, and which ventured to replicate this ‘icy reality’ in its sound and lyrics. Today, hits such as the hymnal ‘Wechselbalg’, the epic, melancholic ‘Unverwandt’, the live ritual ‘Rücken an Rücken’ or the blend of metal and synths ‘Eisige Wirklichkeit’ (‘Icy Reality’, as referenced above) are regarded as classics. What’s more, the 17-minute ‘Angstkathedrale’ represents an absolute masterpiece example of ASP’s concept songs. Together with the other pieces, it already proved back then that it had never occurred to ASP to bow to any musical genre boundaries whatsoever, and that they would detonate all scene pigeonholes with an explosion that would be heard from afar.
Nevertheless, the album drifts like a wisp of fog from an English moor in Victorian times, over into the cold streets of the present day. But however sombre, disturbing, snarling, POEtic and elegiac ‘fremd’ may be: you can always still sense the twinkle in its eye. When mastermind Asp bares his psyche to the listener, a fine humour resonates between the lines, along with an emotionally charged intimacy.
