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Singer Sophia Kennedy
Photo: Ben Jakon / City Slang / picture alliance / dpa
Album of the week:
Sophia Kennedy - "Monsters"
It's such a thing with monsters: Some people suspect they are in the closet or under the bed, but prefer not to look too closely.
Some outright deny their existence (how boring!) - and others simply open the lid of their grand piano, let the creatures inside run free, but first of all sit next to it to check the latest news on their mobile phones.
Like the Hamburg musician Sophia Kennedy on the cover of her second LP.
In the twilight of a recording studio, the opened piano already looks like the mouth of a devious carnivorous plant ready to tear and devour, as in the "Little Shop of Horrors".
In the next scene, you guessed it, the most beautiful chaos will break out.
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Cover of »Monsters«
Photo: City Slang
Kennedy studied film studies and wrote theater music before suddenly becoming an internationally acclaimed pop star with her debut album in 2017. The 31-year-old, who actually comes from Baltimore in the USA, but moved to Göttingen with her mother as a child, knows her way around the dovetailing of performance, staging and music, the cinematic is an elementary part of her pop design, she plays like in the video for her new song "I Can See You", when she crawls to the Lamborghini like Leonardo DiCaprio in Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street". She used to irritate the alternative scene audience with glamorous appearances in tight red vinyl costume and her theatrical, sometimes diva-like crooner singing. You could also imagine her in a tailcoat with a top hat,as the new Marlene of these new, shimmering, restless twenties.
Musically, one looks in vain for reference values in domestic pop music. The fearless and imaginative songwriter Kennedy plays, that's for sure now, in a league with PJ Harvey, St. Vincent or Nadine Shah. But their sound, again co-composed by producer Mense Reents (Goldene Zitronen, Egoexpress), has its roots less in rock and more in vaudeville and American songbooks. Their show tunes pulsate to the rhythm of the minimal beats from Hamburg's electronics scene, as if the Golden Pudel Club were a musical theater.
The "monsters" that Kennedy is now taking on are, on the one hand, her songs, which she described in an interview as "small, unfinished monsters" that had to be tamed in the studio.
Difficult enough: How do you succeed in a follow-up to almost perfect, precise pop songs like "Build Me a House" or "Kimono Hill", which ecstatic critics four years ago?
In the meantime she brought out a noir disco album together with the filmmaker and musician Helena Ratka under the name Shari Vari and sang in German for the first time in a sonorous duet with Stella Sommer.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Sophia Kennedy:
Up
Squid:
GSK
Iceage:
Vendetta
Lisa Who:
Ease
Jake Bugg:
Lost
CHAI:
Action
Illuminati Hotties:
Mmmoooaaaaayaya
Flying Lotus feat. Thundercat:
Black Gold
Teresa Redhead:
West End Girls
Big Brave:
Half Breed
Go to Spotify playlist Go to Apple Music playlist
These relaxation exercises can now be felt on »Monsters«.
Kennedy leaves her songs more room for improvisations, the music has a psychedelic delimitation, some tones are deliberately crooked and crooked, every now and then an electronic module farts into somewhere, "Seventeen" chugs along on the very cheap bossa preset of a home organ.
Then again the floating, midnight surreal is suddenly grounded by real, solid drums like in “Chestnut Avenue” or “I'm Looking Up”, which probably deals with the death of her father two years ago.
It's about transcendence in the face of grief, loss and apocalypse. Often the protagonist of these tracks rushing through the ether glides over everything earthly, in the limbo between life and death, until the feeling for above and below is relievingly lost like in the jazz radio trip "Up" - next to "I Can See You" the maybe clearest hit on this album.
But the crash is always near: In »Seventeen« the singer falls from the highest tree and has to lick the blood from her battered wings. There she lies and waits for the insects that will gnaw her bones (, in "Animals Will Come") while she gazes at the orange sky of the climate catastrophe ("Orange Tic Tac"). "Like a ghost in a suit / I'm floating down the boulevard," she sings in her strict speech, which is sometimes almost rap. A street vendor sells apricots and candied cherries for us decadent hedonists and narcissists, onlookers of the end of the world. "I'm feeling alive, no troubles in sight," she scoffs at this burlesque-threatening scene, her
beautiful dark twisted fantasy
.
Morbid?
Insane?
Sure, of course!
But in Sophia Kennedy's Spiegel-Cabaret der Monster there is always hope.
And very, very good pop music.
(9.0)
Listened briefly:
Squid - "Bright Green Field"
The new British post-punk scene is currently spawning one exciting band after another (Black Midi, Dry Cleaning).
Squid actually come from Brighton and have unleashed their previously minimalist gang-of-four memory sound for their debut to an oppressive, stunning chaos of jazz, drones, math rock and endless killer grooves against the late capitalist Ennui - sometimes roaring wildly, sometimes
uncomfortably numb
.
Milestone material.
(8.7)
Van Morrison - "Latest Record Project Vol. 1"
Imagine you have to listen to a so-called lateral thinker and his frustrated tirades for a full two (!) Hours: The Irish blue-eyed soul gurnard Van Morrison, 75, now an aluminum hat protest singer, has little trouble on his new album given with the well-hung blues music, but he soured with all the more passion and at least as paranoid and self-pitying as his colleague Morrissey on social media, supposed press lies - and conspiracies, British corona politics (all idiots except Nigel Farage) - and wondering Where were the rebels actually gone, to whom he apparently still counts himself in old age.
Well
If it were at least punk, not just foul-smelling pups.
(1.0)
Lisa Who - »A New Beginning«
Madsen keyboardist Lisa Who released her great debut »Sehnsucht« in 2017, but the time was probably not yet ripe for a German musician who plays dreamy prog rock.
Her new album, meanwhile on her own label, now makes understandably many pop concessions, but songs like "Leichtigkeit" still leave two minutes for the atmospheric space opera intro.
It's good that she didn't give up.
(7.0)
Rag'n'Bone Man - "Life By Misadventure"
And another return from the pop year 2017: Rory Graham, a very sympathetic and powerful-voiced bearded singer from Brighton, had a world hit with the gospel blues "Human". The potential of an artist like Rag'n'Bone Man, who used to be active in the hip-hop scene, lies in combining tradition with modernity. Unfortunately, he now took a step back. To Nashville, into the all too shallow country-pop terrain. Nice but a shame.
(4.0)