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Musician Sophia Blenda
Photo: Helmut Fohringer / APA / picture alliance
Album of the week:
Sophia Blenda – »The New Cheerfulness«
"Nobody understands how loud it was," Sophia Blenda sings in a shaky voice at the end of the second song.
Previously, there was talk of "third-hand fires stilled" and "second-hand silently commanded sentences," but the music that ripples and roars is not silent at all;
it illustrates the melancholy drama of our time with ominously urging piano runs, soft creaking and cracking noises, a cold spray of synthetic strings.
The smoldering fires and the whispered but deafeningly loud commands that Blenda laments so poetically in How Loud It Was are probably the background noise of patriarchal constraints that have been whispering codes of conduct into women for centuries, a noise in which independent thinking and Feeling lost all too easily.
Blenda, a 26-year-old singer, songwriter and producer from Vienna, braces herself with her nine compositions against this storm of insecurity in the face of fears about the future and nagging, consuming social media debates.
Alone at the piano in her apartment, she found in herself and her music a place of stillness and liberation, a fortress of self-confidence.
"Die Neue Heiterkeit", the curious title of this collection of enigmatic chamber pop studies, is one of the strongest German-language pop statements of recent times, a female counterweight to comparably impressive soul positioning by male colleagues such as Konstantin Gropper (Get Well Soon) and Max Rieger (All That Violence).
Even as the head of the band Culk, Blenda, whose real name is Sophie Löw, eloquently penetrated the power relations of society and the genders on the album »Zerstreuen über Euch«, repeatedly poking self-critically and questioningly into her own personal conflicts.
After recording the band's second album, she couldn't rest, so she sat down at the piano and experimented with garage band sounds, without initially having a solo album in mind.
When producer Jakob Herber came along at the end, actually to refine the recordings, there was actually hardly anything left to do: the songs were finished, they remained as powerfully formulated and at the same time raw as Blenda had created them.
At the beginning of »Hysteria« her father can be heard scraping snow outside the house.
"Hysteria" is one of the highlights of the album.
Starting from the traditional term with which women's emotionality was long relegated to the realm of pathology, she creates a Gordian knot of contradictory impulses that rage in her and other women with little hope of resolution: »Smooth the waves, you should always make higher waves beat / ebbs flood and bury all your gorges / but you should also smash all your too high waves / smooth waves to overflow.”
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Sophia Blenda
The new cheerfulness
Label: Pias Germany (Rough Trade)
Label: Pias Germany (Rough Trade)
approx. €17.99
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08/19/2022 5:57 p.m
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There is no right in the attributed wrongness: »BH« plays with rhetorical figures with the garment of female (self-)oppression, it stands for »self-conscious attitude«, »covering arrogance«, but also the »piercing hope« for an end to the hiding.
It's about a longing to get rid of a construct of female self-deformation and male repression that serves to "disempower the whole human being underneath," Blenda says in the song's last verse.
In »Fun«, the protagonist at the party staggers through all states of her »Dancing On My Own« mind: »She stays, she screams, she laughs, she cries / I think I'm having fun tonight«.
Despite all the dread and gloom, Blenda pleads for cheerfulness with her suggestive, haunting voice at the end: With "Fear Is an Empty Space" she admonishes the younger generation to be bold - and in the title track evokes the departure into the unknown, the detachment from the comfort zone and the past: "Whoever writes about the future stays cheerful / The appeal to great security remains presumptuous," she sings dreamily, strumming to little sisters who will soon mature into big ones.
As a musician, Sophie Löw recently told the Viennese newspaper Die Presse that she has not felt as seriously taken as she would have liked.
That should have settled here.
(9.0)
Listened briefly:
Megan Thee Stallion – »Traumazine«
We no longer have to say that Megan Pete from Houston, known worldwide as Megan Thee Stallion, is the most accomplished and best rapper of the moment: Already on her debut album "Good News" she presented her numerous skills and the willingness to become a global pop star be competent and compelling in demonstrating;
now a Grammy-winning actress, she's guest starring in potential blockbuster shows like Marvel's new superfeminine series She-Hulk.
The 27-year-old's biggest musical success so far was her slippery pussy empowerment anthem "WAP," which she performed with colleague Cardi B;
now she deals with the last two years of her traumatizing megastar development on a very good, but still conflicting album:
Between chart-worthy tracks like the house anthem "Her" or "Sweetest Pie" (with Dua Lipa) and language-brutal battletracks ("NDA"), she works through the misogyny, gossip and sensationalism in social media and the rap business, while At the same time, she insists on being untouchable - even when she's having a bad day.
"All I really wanna hear is, 'It'll be OK' / Bounce back 'cause a bad bitch can have bad days," she raps over a funny yodel sample in the introspective "Anxiety" and amazes in the ones about celebrity loneliness acting ballads "Star" and "Flip Flop" with sensitive singing.
The beefs and media narratives brought to them from outside still play too big a role in their defensive texts to leave enough room for the beginnings of their own gripping narrative.
But that's part of the game - and Megan Thee Stallion has only just really started playing.
(7.7)
Friedrich Liechtenstein – »Good Gastein«
Malicious gossips may claim that the humor of Friedrich Liechtenstein (“Supergeil”), who became notorious in the mid-1900s, is limited to gags such as the fact that his debut album “Bad Gastein” from 2014 (read: “Bäd”) is now » Good Gastein« had to follow.
hehe.
But in slippery spoken-word pieces like "Tomato Love", the ex-puppeteer, who has become a competent crooner and self-promoter, born in Eisenhüttenstadt in 1956, reveals an insidious abyss and depth of taste hidden in the fairy-tale uncle's hum, which you can savor with relish can melt the tongue.
When, of all things, the man from East Berlin in "West Berlin" lists places, events and people for nine minutes and stylizes himself as a West Algic, you should listen carefully,
Liechtenstein, the two-trick pony, has the chutzpah to kick off his sophomore album with the classic We Have All The Time In The World, which he covered on his debut.
His baritone singing, stretched after Leonard Cohen, which then often only ends up with Harald Juhnke, has now become even more resonant, which benefits him in further interpretations by Lana Del Rey, Carly Simon and Eurythmics.
His stories, told with a lot of gurgles and smacks on the spa hotel balcony, are often enigmatic, perhaps too eccentric, but mostly amusing.
But only when Liechtenstein pulls up his bathrobe and sings and swings does "Good Gastein" get a really good groove.
(7.3)
Phoebe Green - »Lucky Me«
»You don't know me«, sings Phoebe Green in her Robyn-esque hyperpop anthem »Crying In The Club«, »but I don't mind 'cause I don't either«: The theme of the debut album of the 23- year-olds, which has already been proclaimed »Manchester’s next big thing« with singles like »So Grown Up« and »IDK«, is typical of Generation Y: self-discovery and self-awareness, a contemporary emo-existentialism, with Billie Eilish as its superstar and Olivia Rodrigo count.
In addition to some good, relationship-centric pop songs (“Make It Easy”, “Just A Game”), Green's album has a lot to offer musically.
The young musician, supported by Alex Robertshaw and Tom Fuller (Everything Everything), leaves guitars and bedroom ambience behind to switch between alternative rock, hip-hop and R&D.
B and synth pop of the eighties to discover their own sound – and themselves.
(7.0)
Danger Mouse & Black Thought - »Cheat Codes«
Hip-hop has long since entered its classic phase.
If you translate this celebrity collaboration into rock terms, it would be like Brian Eno and Bob Dylan teaming up for an album.
You could call it dad rap: rap for old people.
But that doesn't detract from the outstanding quality.
Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton rose to fame in 2004 with his cheeky Beatles/Jay-Z crossover "The Gray Album", played in bands like Broken Bells and Gnarls Barkley, then, with a penchant for Ennio Morricone and retro-melting, successfully produced acts like Gorillaz, The Black Keys and Michael Kiwanuka.
Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter has been the lyricist and MC for conscious rap godfathers The Roots for over 30 years, a fearless and accomplished chronicler of the Black Experience of racism and social marginalization.
Their album, then called "Dangerous Thoughts", was supposed to be released in the early 2000s, now it unites with epic tracks like "Aquamarine", bitter ghetto and violence exegesis like "Cheat Codes" or the intimate assessment of depression "Identical Deaths". Old-school monolith that old and young fans and musicians of the genre can use to raise themselves musically and morally.
Just the easy-going, elastic funk groove and the Hugh Masekela sample in »No Gold Teeth«, which you've found in the box of rarities... a master at work.
(8.5)