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Musician Casper: A rest distance control
Photo: Chris Black
Album of the week:
A strange but telling encounter ensued between rapper Casper and his audience on Thursday night.
The 39-year-old played the songs from his new album "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" in changing settings and sets in a draughty factory building in Berlin-Oberschöneweide that had been converted into a studio.
The whole thing was filmed and streamed live on the internet until midnight when the record became available, his first in five years.
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Title: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
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Curiously, the YouTube audience was closer to the artist than the approximately 100 invited people on site, who had to crane and twist their heads and necks behind barriers and fences to catch a glimpse of Casper and what was happening.
When he finally seemed close enough to touch, on a small club stage, and together with Kraftklub frontman and rapper (Felix) Kummer, he performed the impetuously rocking song "Give me danger", the whole room was shrouded in artificial fog, so that one could again only recognize schemes.
"Make it brighter, make it brighter," Casper demands at the beginning of this anthem.
He wants to »feel that I was there«, he sings, wants to see, experience and feel as much as he can.
That sounds like great, newfound clarity.
But there is still some distance control left, and that's not just due to the corona virus.
The situation is similar with »Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt«: At first glance, the album is a musically and lyrically powerful comeback full of intensive, powerful self-reflections and stories.
Casper's music, which has always oscillated between indie rock and rap, was produced for the first time by Max Rieger, frontman of the rock band Dienervs and solo artist with All die power, who with his work for Drangsal, Ilgen-Nur and Mia Morgan is a kind of Rick Rubin of the German alternative -pop and -rock has become.
He refines and differentiates the previously often clumsy Casper sound with string and piano accents, opens up new resonance spaces for the throaty rap of the German-American Benjamin Griffey from Ostwestfalen-Lippe, who not only has his roots in hip-hop,
In Rieger's emo soundscape, which vibrates with a lot of melancholy, Casper processes his fears and doubts of the past few years.
He'd done just that on his last, best album yet, Long Live Death, a bravely unruly monument to depression that dealt with his struggle with fame and his role as an alternative rap idol.
"Depression on foot, like a dog on the hunt," says the title song of his new record, which he himself regards as a kind of "compilation of his last three or four albums."
A therapeutic diary from which he wanted to continue, as he told Rolling Stone.
But where?
Casper's merit in the past ten years since his breakthrough with "XOXO" is the expansion of the German rap spectrum with a soulful, non-masculine, so to speak woke facet, which also empowers artists like Maeckes, Marteria, Kummer or the Berlin newcomer Schmyt to do so has to oppose the sexism and macho demeanor of the genre with more sensitive tones.
"Tear down walls with my voice," Casper raps in the self-celebration "Let it rain roses for me," in which, based on Hildegard Knef, not only a decidedly female side shines, but also the pop appeal with guest singer Lena Meyer-Landrut is hugged.
The fact that the album's driest old-school beats click and sizzle is further evidence of the delightful in-between-seats game that makes Casper so interesting.
But this is exactly where this album falls apart into its individual parts, as it might have to be with a still uncertain new start.
In haunting songs like "Billie Jo" (about a tragic suicide and family murder in his relatives) and "Fabian" (about a friend who died of leukemia), Casper strengthens a narrator's voice that is rare in German indie pop, from which he himself, with all The tragedy of the stories seems to draw more hope and strength than from eternal ego reflections.
In the stories of the others, he overcomes the distance and ultimately conveys closeness.
In particular, the provocative observation of those who have been left behind »Zwiebel & Mett (The Forgotten Pt. 3)«, but also the climate change morality »The Little Rain (The Forgotten Pt. 4)«, which almost reaches into jazz, become gloomy but promising signposts into the future of rap songwriter Casper beyond 40 and slowly weary (and exhausting) self-fixation.
Or, as the clever Kummer aptly puts it in »Give me danger«: »Even more self-care and we will die of happiness«.
(7.8)
Listened briefly:
Knarf Rellöm Arkestra – »Criticism of the meritocracy«
"Say it loud: You screwed up!" That's the sentence and the groove we've been waiting for, so that we can smash it in a good mood at these right-wing stray walkers, including AfD, Trump and Orbán fans.
"What's the matter with the squares?
Why do they want to be alternative?” asks Knarf Rellöm in the killer track on his new album.
The veteran of the very old Hamburg funk school, to whom Deichkind owes a lot of pioneering work, presents himself with his new »Arkestra« as a sexy left-futurist in the sense of Sun Ra.
With a reference from Beuys against the Deutsche Bank (»Kalter Funk«), against the real estate madness (»The rents are too high«) and with a wonderfully drunk discourse band of Ahab, Odysseus, Faust and Quasimodo on an acid trip, the Rellöm supposedly came up with this idea when he was still with the truly legendary band Huah!
played in Dithmarschen in the late eighties.
At its core, King Tubby, Kraftwerk and McLuhan's media theory enter into a compelling but deeply relaxed dance community, which in turn offers slogan material for the next counter-demo: »No discussion, percussion«.
soul punk!
(8.2)
Sasami - »Squeeze«
The 90's revival rolls through the current pop - and of course also brings back long-suppressed cringe stuff like nu metal, you know: Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and other pain man bang.
ugh!
But when US musician and producer Sasami Ashworth embraces the ubiquitous genre of her LA youth, even that becomes enjoyable and transcends into a now more feminine indie rock contemporary.
Unlike on their more introspective debut from 2019, no song sounds like the other here: It's metal thumping "Skin A Rat", it's power popping ("The Greatest"), there's Fleetwood Mac ("Make It Right"), industrial emo (»Say It) and a thrash version of Daniel Johnston's »Sorry Entertainer«.
Doesn't sound bad at all thanks to Sasami's catchy, feminist-based songwriting,
but surprisingly cool.
Perhaps these are the captivating powers of the Japanese yōkai mythical creature Nure-onna, as Ashworth portrays herself on the cover of her album: the snake woman's hard kiss.
(7.5)
Zustra - »The Dream of Reason«
Before she became a music journalist (who used to write here as well), German-Croatian musician Ariana Zustra worked in an art gallery.
There hung a print of Goya's graphic »The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters«, which haunted her daydreams - and now also on the cover and title of her debut album.
But even if the harsh synth noises at the beginning of »Back to Dark« are reminiscent of the creepy aliens in the movie »Arrival«, Zustra's baroque dream pop and trip hop too often remains attached to the aesthetic rather than the nightmarish.
This can be found overly mannered, sometimes a little too exhibited smart and knowledgeable.
But more relaxed song lines like »The Empire strikes back,
(7.0)
King Hannah - "I'm Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me"
The grunge shaman Mark Lanegan, who unfortunately died far too early, would have liked King Hannah's pitch-dark and world-weary Gothic-Americana music.
Songwriter Hannah Merrick, a vocal successor to Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star), wishes her apparently childish ex in "Big Big Baby" that he should choke on a dumpling, "at least that would be mildly fun".
In »All Being Fine« she tells how she wet the bed as a child, but hey: everything will be fine, at some point she will become the »Well-Made Woman«, about whom she sings mockingly in the psycho-blues of the same name .
Anyone who rightly doubts this will find plenty of resonant space on the debut of the duo from Liverpool to hangover with beautifully delayed trip-hop references (»Foolius Caesar«) and grunge echoes,
guitarist Craig Whittle dims down to pulsing noir folk.
Just wallow in a bad mood at dawn, in the rain?
No excuses.
(8.0)
