The musical head of Erd Möbel stands alone in the goal with his slurping indie rock.
You think about it that way. “The ambulance stops opposite at the retirement home, that happens every day,” reflects Ekki Maas, but “that’s probably normal, it’s normal in front of the retirement home.” Yes, it’s probably normal, but that’s exactly what it’s about, not just in the opening song “ At Home”, not only in the wonderfully relaxed “A completely normal day”, but actually everywhere on the sensibly titled SOLOALBUM solo album by the musical mastermind of Erd Möbel, it is about a normality that regularly tips over into a bizarre ordinariness.
You can hear it in the dabbed, heartbeat-pulsating music, which also integrates screaming guitars like in “Wind” in a loving embrace. It’s the guitars in general that sound completely different than the folky, almost jazzy earth furniture. Here it’s more direct, dirty, Lou-Reediger, but you still notice, especially in the constant, monotonous slurping rhythm, that the same 64-year-old is behind it.
The differences become clearer when comparing poetry. Maas has made several solo albums, but this is the first with his own lyrics. While Markus Berges tells stories for Earth Furniture and is now more successful as a novelist, Maas – apart from the fiery, perhaps somewhat naive plea for open borders, “Let them all in” – remains mostly descriptive and autobiographical, most clearly in “Goalkeeper”, his memories of the “Westphalian plains, where I come from”. There are painful memories, and not just because the goalkeeper Ekki Maas let through all the balls that came into his box.