Stella Sommer - "Northern Dancer": Listened - Album of the Week

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Album of the week:

Stella Sommer - "Northern Dancer"

Comparisons to famous artists can be flattering at the beginning of a career, but at some point it starts to get on your nerves.

At Stella Sommer, the time had come in 2019.

She was bored of constantly being asked about the sixties icons Nico or Hildegard Knef because their sonorous, often declamatory voice sounded so amazingly similar.

After ten years of continuously releasing music with her band Die Heiterkeit and as a solo artist that was critically acclaimed with growing enthusiasm, one could now simply say: "That sounds like Stella Sommer is a song to sing."

Maybe it's time for Northern Dancer.

With her second English-language album, the 33-year-old Berliner by choice gives up much of her usual aloofness and at the same time strengthens her claim to be noticed not only in Germany but also internationally.

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Stella summer

Northern Dancer

Label: Northern Dancer Records (membrane)

Label: Northern Dancer Records (membrane)

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10/30/2020 7:08 p.m.

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Sommer's singing, which used to be embedded in the noise of indie rock or alienated by reverb, no longer seems diva-like, distant, but rather warm and intimate.

For example when in "Shadows Come In All Colors" she sings surprisingly lovely to the sound of a sacred organ that she regards shades of shadows like black and blue as her family.

The twilight, the turmoil of the conflict, defining themes on cheerfulness albums such as "Pop & Tod I + II" or most recently "What happened" seem to have given way to a relieving acceptance of depressive tendencies and circumstances.

A liberation, apparently because summer also lets her voice run free.

In her new songs, the singer, who grew up in the North Sea coastal town of St. Peter Ording, tells folk-mystical things about backward-flowing oceans, lights on the water or flowers that do not want to grow, accompanied by cautious piano arrangements or soft guitar, primed by whirring, orchestral percussion.

They are sad, but also proud ballads of a lonely stroll on the beach who has found herself and the beauty of her music more and more through all kinds of storms.

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Of course, she remains aloof: "The Eyes of the Singer" describes how one can get lost in the melancholy gaze of a singer, bewitched and captivated, without ever getting a chance to penetrate her aura: "There's no way to see through her ".

In the sixties pop single "A Lover Alone", she weighs the missing of a loved one against the grandeur and self-sufficiency of lonely lovers.

A life in longing can also give pleasure.

Even if at the beginning of the album she lures you to a ballet on the shore of a lake with horns and shawms, then the beings waiting there are not necessarily of human form.

"Northern Dancer", one should perhaps keep that in mind with a horse girl like Stella Sommer, was the name of a legendary racing horse, an English thoroughbred.

Sorry boys!

It is all the more great how reliably and confidently the music, emotionally produced by Max Rieger (Die Nerven, Ilgen Nur) with embracing choirs and optimistic bright sunbeam sounds asserts itself against the immanent gloom of its creator and her tendency to misanthropy.

In contemporary pop from Germany that is quite incomparable.

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