ELLEN ALLIEN - Thrills

Two years after "Berlinette" and four after "Stadtkind", Ellen Allien returns right on schedule - by now a well-known DJ, electronic musician and owner of the BPitch Control label.

If her fame has grown lately, there are several reasons for it. First of all because "Berlinette" was a truly fine little record, one that appealingly blended the most rigorous techno-house with a strongly pop attitude, without ever losing sight of the German tradition in this field (complete with a tribute-quote to "Trans-Europe Express" at the end of "Wish"). Then there's the fact that Ellen is an extremely generous DJ, one who travels a lot, always attentive to reading the pulse of the crowd without ever slipping into mere, anonymous crowd-pleasing. Then, again, there's the unexpected success of her BPitch label, which recently celebrated its hundredth release. Last but not least, her charisma: the Berlin native's photogenic looks have earned her numerous magazine covers, as well as a place of honour in the memory of the electronic music audience (mostly, alas, male). And all this without resorting to the sexy brashness of someone like Miss Kittin, by the way.

To find the key to reading a work as immediate as her new effort, the title alone will do. "Thrills" are the shivers running down your spine. They're what Ellen shares with her audience every time she performs, every time someone puts on one of her records. They're also the sensations she gets back from the people dancing in front of her. "Your body is my body", she says on the title track. "Your thrills are my thrills, my thrills are your thrills", she stated in an interview. Could she be any clearer? In a way, Allien is trying to get back to the roots of the most physical kind of feeling, and it's only natural that the music on this album returns to the origins of dance music.

"Thrills" thus presents itself, in some respects, as a change of direction. It's a harder record than its predecessor, veering towards a less compromising strain of techno-house. While remaining modern, the sound is at the same time slightly retro, dominated by analogue tones - like those of her new toy, an Arp 2600 bought after a long search on eBay. Production is once again handled alongside her trusty collaborator Holger Zielske, as on previous records. There's a great deal of attention to detail here, to undercurrents that are sometimes almost imperceptible, but which give a sense of just how carefully this "Thrills" was crafted. We're nowhere near the excellence of the genre's great masters, no, but this is certainly a solid release, as the opening "Come" already demonstrates - a typical intro track, better suited to a plush pre-club sofa than to the dancefloor.

With "The Brain Is Lost" the album's coordinates are set: it's an almost jagged track, partly because of Ellen's vocals. Rather than singing, Ellen chants slogans, and she'll do the same on many of the other vocal tracks on the album, like the following "Your Body Is My Body", buoyed by a telluric drive. Teutonic power returns on "Washing Machine Is Speaking", the track that most recalls "Berlinette", driven by pulsing blasts and a theme that couldn't be more Kraftwerk-like if it tried - only Hütter and Schneider themselves could top it. From there we move from the pinball rush of "Down" to the dreamy decompression of "Ghost Train", a captivating nocturnal journey somewhere between the mellower Chemical Brothers and the kosmische cosmos.

Preceded by "Cloudy City" and "She Is With Me", two successful bursts of old-school analogue fury/fundamentalism (a dive straight back into 1995), the single "Magma" is coyly placed at the close, offering up the line that might (maybe, who knows!) give your summer of international flirting an extra kick: "You make me so magma!"

Once the record is over, you can't help but notice that it lacks the ability to make the album appealing even to those with no interest whatsoever in the more physical dimension of listening - though one suspects the Berlin artist herself simply isn't interested in that kind of audience. Even though we preferred "Berlinette", Ellen Allien's third studio album shows us an artist still growing, and a future full of rewards for anyone willing to keep following her.

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30/04/2026