Album of the week with Kraftklub: How good that it exists

2022-09-23T18:10:16.253Z

Arrived to stay: With a more mature comeback, Kraftklub will become an even more important indie rock bastion against hate and hopelessness in the East. »Kargo« is our album of the week. And: News from Dagobert.

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Rock band power club

Photo:

Philip Gladsome

Album of the week:

Kraftklub – »Kargo«

Actually, the band could have renamed themselves for their comeback: a club is what the five musicians from Chemnitz have built around themselves in the twelve years since they were founded, and it's no longer a club, as was shown not least last weekend , when singer Felix Kummer sold out the Wuhlheide open-air stage in Berlin with 17,000 fans at the end of his successful solo project.

Or on Wednesday, when the band, reactivated after five years, played a free concert at the start of the Reeperbahn Festival and paralyzed almost the entire Hamburg neighborhood mile due to the rush.

The club has become a festival, a mass event.

There is (apart from the musically and lyrically violent punks of Feine Sahne Fischfilet) no other German-speaking rock band of this age group that is decidedly left-wing

This is a rare achievement, a tour de force, to come to the jokingly more appropriate band name.

And for this effort not to have become bitter, cynical or saturated, but still to be there, to counter the lack of prospects and apathy with stormy, sometimes impetuous indie rock anthems, Kraftklub celebrate on their fourth album "Kargo" with the infectious one Euphoria from songs like »Part of this band« or »Just one song«.

This double at the beginning alone contains the essence of the band: rousing bursts of energy from melodic adrenaline rock, power pop and grief into hip-hop reaching rap.

They were initiated in the last big boom of the indie genre at the beginning of the noughties with guitar bands like the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand or The Killers,

In addition, Brummer/Kummer vehemently reaffirms his commitment to the band and a permanently disparate rock'n'roll existence in "Teil This Band" with the sympathetic revelation of a pronounced imposter syndrome: "I don't have anything in my hands, that something counts / No degree from a great university / No business ideas, just a head full of topics / But not even a tiny half plan B.« Even »if that was it, then it was worth it«, sings the now 33-year-old, summing up the interim balance – and wants to continue until someone realizes that they can't sing properly and don't play an instrument.

This is the credo of Art Brut, one of the young British bands of the class of 2003 that briefly set the tone, transferred to the present day of German indie pop: Look at them, they formed a band!

power club

cargo

Label: Vertigo Berlin

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For the time being, Kraftklub have decided to continue singing hymns against hate and hopelessness, their songs don't want to divide, but create a sense of togetherness that doesn't feed on the canon and life experiences of related boomer bands like Die Ärzte or Die Toten Hosen , but from the sensitivities of millennials.

This is good news for guitar rock per se - and a no less popular or emotional counterweight to dull right-wing rock bands, especially in the east of the republic.

Because Kraftklub have still not moved to Berlin, but now that they have gotten older, they also describe the conflict of staying loyal to a city like Chemnitz.

The first melancholy of growing up has nested in the new songs, which makes them almost more haunting than early popular hits like "I don't want to go to Berlin" or "Shots in the air".

»Wittenberg is not Paris« quarrels with the philistinism of bourgeois hipsters, sheds light on permanent East-West differences and settles accounts with young salon leftists and greens in the safe bubbles of the big city neighborhoods: »It’s easier to call out Nazis where there are no Nazis there.« Kraftklub also take a critical look at the sustainability of their own commitment in their hometown.

In "September Fourth" the band recaps

what happened one day after their spectacular "We are more" concert against the right from 2018: not too much.

"On September 4th, the trains will run regularly again, and nothing has changed, the city center is empty again," sings Brummer and in "Fear" conjures up the uneasiness of the bourgeoisie to look the evil in the country in the face distorted with hatred.

But he doesn't want to resign himself to the apparently never-ending baseball bat years: "Maybe we're not anymore, but I'm not alone!"

The fight against the circumstances and against the hardening goes on, even if it's difficult at times.

In between, the band drifts briefly into the escapist, threatens to lose its center with the addition of guests.

The result is pseudo-political love kitsch like “No God, no state, only you” (with Mia Morgan) – or the mini-road movie “Fahr mit mir (4x4)”, for which the Kraftklub with the Magdeburgers from Tokyo, who have meanwhile emigrated to LA, developed Hotel squeezed into the GDR cult car Lada Niva and pondering farewell to the East - or a life without "rules, penalties and laws, except to live in such a way that Franz Josef Wagner would have something against it." This PR campaign is more than a gimmick. effective east-east duo: Kraftklub were and stay best where they are and where they come from.

They've reached rock star status

to stay

To make noise, to rage, to comfort and sometimes also terribly annoying.

How good that they exist.

(7.7)

Listened briefly:

Kitty Solaris - »Girls & Music«

And once again the world stands still for a moment when Kitty Solaris plays her suggestive pop music, which draws on several decades of indie rock, disco and electronics: "And the world stops turning", sings the DIY musician Kirsten Hahn, label owner and event muse of the Berliner Schokoladens, with a deep voice in the first song of their eighth album.

None of them sounds like the other, so Hahn threw overboard the wave sound he had recently found for the excellent "Sunglasses" - for a now more classic electro and dream pop ambience, sometimes sounding like air, sometimes like Stranglers, sometimes a little too courtesy of producer Damien Press.

The songwriter is by no means in a cozy chill zone.

In her texts she mourns the untimely death of a friend,

whose purpose in life was evidently the eponymous elements »Girls & Music«.

Women and music, that's no reason to celebrate anyway, if you look at the depressing results of the latest MaLisa study on gender parity in German pop.

In the Bee Gees slow-motion »Disco Blues« or in the guitar fog of »Mystery Girl«, Hahn seems to be reflecting sarcastically on the marginal position of women playing music, it's about transience and futility, capitalism and colonial racism (»Kill The Beast«).

However, the gloomy thoughts are absorbed by the bright, never resigned, but comfortingly pulsating music: the world keeps turning, maybe for the better again.