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Rock band Kettcar

Photo: Andreas Hornoff / Grand Hotel van Cleef

Album of the week:

If you're honest, the Kettcar, a cult vehicle for young people in the 1970s, was a pretty darn thing: you felt like you were in a sleek beach buggy, but you had to pedal like hell in an ultimately uncomfortable seating position in order to get into a rush of speed. A lot of hard work for a little feeling of happiness! The Hamburg guitar pop band, which named itself after the children's go-kart at the beginning of the noughties, always incorporated this hardship into songs that only superficially seemed like North German escapist romanticism: "Landungsbrücken raus", "Sylt" or "Deiche" were the early names Hits. However, there was no escaping the fundamentally wrong life in these hymns either. No matter how hard they tried to do everything right.

Even today the band is drawn to places by the sea. But there is still no escape: “There is so much joy, but no fun,” states singer and songwriter Marcus Wiebusch in the new song “Rügen,” which is about a childless weekend trip to the Baltic Sea island. He promises freedom ("First sex, and then let's see"), but then ends up back in the everyday family prison: "Breathe, breathe, function/ And never lose patience." "Everything will get better," is the desperately optimistic phrase hollow mantra that Wiebusch repeats monotonously in the song. No, nothing will get better.

So, for better or for worse, you have to deal with the present. Kettcar do exactly that on their first new album in seven years. “Good Mood Unjustly Distributed” is missing a comma in the title, but not much else to make it one of the best and most urgent German rock albums of the year. Because contrary to what you might expect from men of older age, i.e. mid-50s, Kettcar have not switched to the comfortable e-mountain bike, but are continuing to pedal. Against comfort and circumstances.

Wiebusch brought the political element in the group's DNA with him from the 1990s and his punk band …But Alive. Ever since Kettcar forced their audience to adopt an empathetic change of perspective in the immigration discussion in 2017 with the German-German refugee anthem "Summer '89", Kettcar's socio-political impetus has come to the fore more vehemently: Emo rock was yesterday, today it needs tougher bandages. As in “Munich”, a powerful rejection of racism and right-wing violence, which the band released in advance in January, in keeping with the mass demonstrations against the AfD.

Kettcar's songs penetrate deeply into the conscience of their listeners, but not with a piercing finger. However, they themselves lack the answer to the question of how the complexity of the present, with all its tormenting conflicts and discourses, could be dealt with in a morally flawless manner. They simply create an emotionally charged web of reference into which you can drop yourself and your fears for a few moments or an album's length. Good rock music can do that. And Kettcar are a good, mature rock band.

This is evident in the first song, “Sixth hour for me too,” which depicts the state of excessive demands fueled by the media with snapshots written closely together: “Mediterranean, mass grave, so sad here, cynical there,” (…) “Sandy beach, boy dead , Netflix, supper", (…) "Hashtag #alsowhatever, thick neck, short fuse". They also self-deprecatingly reflect on their own role as pop stars, the constant threat of self-indulgence and empty phrases in the song, which contains so much information and thoughts that Wiebusch's hoarse singing is almost a breathless rap: »Interview, promotion, commenting on the whole situation/ It's important that you behave, it's important that you take a stand / 'Our most political album since…' / Oh please, I fell asleep for a moment.«

Just as mercilessly - and with unusual industrial harshness - the debate about artists who have fallen out of favor, the difficult separation between good work and bad author, is dissected in "Kanye in Bayreuth": Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Picasso, Louis CK or Kanye West are chased up the green hill. There are no easy solutions here either. What remains? Boycott? Indignation? Punch a bloody nose? “So that the powerless can feel the power and then lead the digital mob into battle,” sneers Wiebusch in one of his most effective verses.

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Kettcar

Good mood unfairly distributed

Label: Grand Hotel Van Cleef

Label: Grand Hotel Van Cleef

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The band's new narrative toughness and power is shown most effectively in "Shopping in Times of War", an anti-capitalist odyssey through the supermarket full of strange scenes and crazy characters. It is Kettcar's "Lost in the Flood", a small masterpiece based on Bruce Springsteen.

Even more than the previous album "I vs We", "Good Mood Unfairly Distributed" is the testament of a prototypical Generation X band. She wonders where all the certainties and ideals have gone, but also the lightness, the playfulness, the fun with which people used to be able to pretend that the Kettcar was a racing car. There is always a fear of taking responsibility for reality. “In the kitsch in your lyrics, in the wrinkles on your face / I see that you are still as afraid as I am,” Wiebusch’s 20-year-old self writes at the end in a “letter” to the graying punk rocker he has become . So where should the quarrels, doubts and (self-)hatred go? “You do what you have to / And you hope that it’s enough,” sings Wiebusch. There is no better, more bitter way to sum up the desolate state of mind of this age cohort.

(8.9/10)

Listened briefly:

Collapsing new buildings – “ramps”

Even the 65-year-olds are losing their coordinate system in these uncertain times: “Ick we don’t/ Ick we don’t/ Ick we don’t/ It’s all postponed,” says Berlin-based new building architect Blixa Cash on his band’s new album. In order to realign themselves with the present, the old avant-gardists are reflecting on old virtues. “Ramps” is what they call improvised rehearsals of new pieces live in front of an audience at concerts, the recordings of which are then finalized in the studio – almost like the Beatles did back then! The reduced album artwork with the old Neubauer logo is also intended to be reminiscent of their “white album”.

In general, Cash is based on the idea “that the collapsing new buildings in another solar system are just as famous as the Beatles in our world.” Of course! Despite their enormous international influence on ambient music, industrial and noise rock and a certain established status in the cultural scene, the Dada sound of the Neuhäusern, with all the experimental "Schisslaweng", has always remained extraterrestrial,

far out

- even 44 years after their founding. Cash calls it “Apm” with his humor that is always serious: “Alien Pop Music”. There's plenty of that on "Rampen", surprisingly cuddly in doubtful glimpses of the future like "How much longer" - or in "Gesundbrunnen", which makes one of the most uninhabited places in Berlin seem very homely. As usual, they are poltergeisty, but with a slightly milder clinking and clinking sound in “Ick weeß nich (not yet)” or “Everything Will Be Fine”. "It could be... that we'll get along," Cash declaims to the rhythmic noise of his intergalactic demolition crew. Eat better.

(8.0/10)

Sofia Portanet – »Chasing Dreams«

When Sofia Portanet released her debut album »Freier Geist« four years ago, it wasn't just the German music press that celebrated. In Great Britain, the motherland of pop, a BBC radio station also went out on a limb and described the Berlin-based singer as "Germany's next international pop star." The reason for the enthusiasm was Portanet's eclectic sound of new wave, synth and goth pop, which she performed in German, English and French with exalted singing and a great sense of melancholy lyricism. Back then there was no name for this style, today the genre is called “Neue Neue Deutsche Welle”, or NNDW for short, and was made popular during the pandemic by young artists like Edwin Rosen. But now the mother of NNDW returns with a brilliant new album that effectively expands Portanet's range: the duet "Lust" (with Tobias Bamborschke) and the rave anthem "Ballon" still sound very much like German indie pop. But in glittering dance pop songs like “Real Face,” “Entre nos levres” or “Unstoppable,” the French-born artist is reminiscent of role models like Guesch Patti or Mylène Farmer from the trendy eighties. With this nouvelle nouvelle vague, Portanet not only finds its way back to its origins, but may also soon achieve international success.

(7.7/10)

Augn – »Barleycorn/Fata Morgana«

The Berlin duo Augn is something like the antithesis of Kettcar, if you will: in the nihilistic minimal cosmos of the two still anonymous wearers of stocking masks, there is no hope, no epicness, no beauty or warmth to which one clings in despair. Just cynicism. Bad mood, evenly distributed, so to speak. This could have an explosive, anarchistic force, like a year ago on the snappy debut double album, something outrageous and angry between Sleaford Mods and Deichkind. Really good stuff doesn't come around that often. At concerts, the musicians were represented by cardboard mates, and the music came from the tape. But this first (pretty good) gag has now been made - and what remains for the time being is an increasingly empty stitch. The new, double Augn album has few new ideas, but a lot of uniform, lethargic beats, a few rather cheap provocations, which reveal their meanness more in the video clips than in the well-oiled lyrics. Maybe there will be something with more punch, but the whole project is perhaps too inherently designed to be fucked up. Real punks.

(4.0/10)