by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There’s a delicious tension to the music of the Robocop Kraus, the funky, punky art-rock quintet from Nürnberg, Germany. Soaring choruses and unshakable grooves wrestle with jagged cadences and melodic odd angles, and the listener comes out the winner.

Lyrically, however, the band’s battles invariably seem to wind up as toss-ups. Take “After Laughter Comes Tears” and “Life Amazes Us Despite Our Miserable Future,” a pair of numbers off the band’s Epitaph debut They Think They Are… which don’t make statements so much as pose questions. Could it be that we in modern, privileged, rational societies share a subsurface malaise, a sense that we lack a reliable structure to our lives—an absence invisible because of the speed and complexity of those lives?

Singer Thomas Lang seems to feel so. “It makes me nervous when I listen to music that gives too many answers, musically and lyrically. I guess we express a lot of doubts, in the lyrics and in the music, and also the title of the album—we doubt our identity. Most of the stuff is a personal feeling, but of course we appreciate it if people can connect to it. It’s often my impression that it’s not just us who are confused and have their doubts.”

Compare that to “Too Good To Be True” and “Concerned, Your Secular Friends,” two songs that tackle religious certainty—the latter addressing former drummer Johannes Uschalt’s sudden fundamentalist conversion.

“We’ve had long discussions about that, because it deals with a delicate story. He’s one of our friends, and he turned away from music and broke all his records. I didn’t want to express any hatred or anything. Far from that. It was more like, we were really confused when he just left from one day to the other, without explanation.”

The frustration for an atheist confronting religion is the absence of a clearly-defined alternative. “We have to be aware of the fact that maybe we lack something,” says Lang. “Atheism is defined by not knowing or believing in something. It’s a negative thing, so there’s always the question that there might be a hole somewhere in our existence. We have to look at this hole because we don’t have easy answers to everything.”

More troubling still is the creeping sense that authoritarian religion and ethnic nationalism, two things the Robocop Kraus won’t be celebrating any time soon, might provide exactly the structure we’ve been missing.

“Definitely,” says Lang, “but I also wonder, for an intelligent person, if he accepts the belief system of some religion, that it costs him the same energy that it costs an atheist to live with their doubts. It costs the same energy to not see the weaknesses of the belief system, to look away from its incongruities.

“That’s on a personal level. On the political or social level, the question is different. We have to see where the power is.”

With les Nonnes Flinguées, the Paper Cranes and DJ Ivory Temple at Jupiter Room on Saturday, March 4, 9 p.m., $12

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