reviews / 2025

PANZERBALLETT - Übercode Œuvre

Name: PANZERBALLETT – Übercode Œuvre
Item: Übercode Œuvre
Rating: 7
Author: Marco Sgrignoli

2025 (Self-released)

avant-prog, classical-crossover, djent, jazz-metal

by Marco Sgrignoli

Have you ever heard Vivaldi's "L'estate" in its metalversion? If right now a banner reading "I wish I'd died before this" is flashing through your mind, your protective instinct can hardly be blamed. But you'd be wrong to dismiss on principle "Übercode Œuvre", the new, hyper-vitaminized schizoid avant-prog experiment from Germany's Panzerballett, this time in classical fusionguise. Backed by a handful of exceptional guests, the quartet "funky jazz math "metal" from Munich go all in with brazen covers, original tracks and wildly inventive classical reworkings, always geared toward maximizing estrangement.

Currently lacking a steady drummer, the band compensates by inviting heavyweights of the jazz circuit onto the record, prog e metal: even better if jazz-prog-metal, all three combined. On four tracks there's the much-admired Marco Minnemann (Steven Wilson, Mohini Dey, The Aristocrats), on two we find Virgil Donati (Planet X, Asia, UK), on one Morgan Ågren (Kaipa, Special Defects).

There's also room for Sebastian Lanser (with the band until 2021), who opens the album with a version of "Bleed" by Meshuggah, and for Rush's new drummer Anika Nilles, with whom the band tackles a radical overhaul of Average White Band's classic disco-funk track "Pick Up The Pieces".

Restless, impetuous, the album plays for high stakes and confronts head-on the risk of kitschy excess - emerging victorious. Not content with what it's done to Vivaldi, it also takes aim at Ligeti ("The Devil's Staircase") and delivers not one but two reworkings of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Both chameleonic and incendiary. An exhilarating record from the first note to the last.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

31/12/2025

Share on

This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition