Gothic rock as a pathos antidote to the stupidity of evil.
You don’t have to look far to see what a child of spirit is ONCE AGAIN WITH YOU AGAINST FEAR. You just have to look at the song titles: “Melancholia”, “Im Herbst”, “One more in the cement”. Even “Paradise” is just a place where someone takes on “the entire destruction of the world,” and “La Boum” also comes across as viscous, like water just before freezing, despite a tidy ringing bell.
Klez.e has now been around for almost a quarter of a century, during which the Berlin band has never reinvented itself, but has continued to work undeterred on an approach that now shines with coherent consistency on their sixth album. Guitarist and singer Tobias Sievers, who sounds completely different with other projects (Delbo, And The Golden Choir) and production jobs (Phillip Boa, Me & My Drummer, Juli and many others), writes songs in which the protagonists get lost “on the longest day of the year” (“Melancholia”), they despair of their own consumption, the “sorrow of our time” and “fall into their own red wine” (“I see it on myself”), while slow guitars desperately sound the alarm, Daniel Moheit’s suicidal keyboard surfaces gray out the world and Filip Pampuch’s drums rumble through inflamed intestines.
The music goes where it really hurts, where people fail because of themselves, but it goes there with the person. Yes, that sounds pompous, but that is the greatness of this music, a greatness that The Cure have also mastered, who have always and still hover over Klez.e as the fathers of Klez.e, to overcome this pathos and make it sound true. A pathos that you sometimes need as an antidote to the stupidity of evil, which seems so trivial and irrelevant these days.