As of: February 18, 2024, 3:07 p.m
By: Susanne Greiner
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The singers of “Buben im Pelz” Christian Fuchs (front) and David Pfister with keyboardist Bernd Supper (left).
© Greiner
Covering something unique fails.
Which is why the “Boys in Furs” are now using the songs of their heroes “Velvet Underground” as a template for the second time – and reinterpreting them.
The icing on the cake: the brutal, sweet melancholy of Viennese.
They were guests at the Landsberg City Theater with their album “Verwandler”.
Landsberg – The magic of Viennese language unfolds almost tenderly in the “Boys in Furs” when “Teenage Mary” becomes “little Mietzi”, a symbol of frivolous innocence.
He winks when “I'm sticking to you” becomes “I'm sticking to you” complete with an eagle owl.
Or he shows himself to be highly poetic when the boys in “Venus in Furs” transform the “different colors made of tears” into “a thousand colors, and all red”.
The songs transform – and become the boys’ own.
And this through deep devotion and immeasurable adoration: “The Velvets are medicine,” says Christian Fuchs, who is responsible for the vocals together with David Pfister.
The current album “Verwandler” – which is not only dedicated to the Lou Reed album “Transformer” but also to the entire work of the Velvets around John Cale and Reed – is the second nod to the Velvets, released on the tenth anniversary of Lou Reed’s death October 27, 2023. The first was the album in 2015, where the Vienna sausage was enthroned on the boy's cover instead of the Warhol banana.
Musically, the “Boys in Furs” remain true to their role model.
Bernd Supper gives the “Sunday Morning” intro the childhood color on the keyboard, before the gentle major chords on the guitar (Markus Reiter) waft with a confident bass (Christof Baumgartner) and consistent, cozy drums (Roland Reiter) - as a contrast to the absolute Loneliness that the text brings to life.
The voices of Fuchs and Pfister fit the rather provisional-seeming nature of the arrangements: the sound doesn't always sit where it should.
But who needs that with these songs that live from their mood and not from perfection.
“The Wild”
And so the urgency of “I'm waiting for my Man” in Vienna's “Schwedenplatz” remains, with Supper hopping and pounding on the keyboard and Fuchs with a dirty voice telling his dealer instead of wearing black with a straw hat in Nike sneakers and “Adidas Gwandl “ can occur.
The Viennese “Walk on the Wide Side” is great, which becomes “Die Wüdn” on the Danube: a hymn to five transvestites.
With “Rock'n'Roll” guitarist Reiter has visibly arrived at home - before in “Tiaf wie a Spiagl” (“I'll be your Mirror”) the devil drinks the blood and the Lord eats the soul: a ballad par excellence with ruthless love, in which all six musicians surrender to kitsch without fear - which is why it can't get kitsch at all.