Distorted guitars, glam, Britpop, Morrissey, circa “Southpaw Grammar” (1995). But: Pig skirt it ain’t! On their new album, Ja, Panik sound so relaxed, as if they had been fighting a battle for years that no one could win, but that hadn’t turned them into a pile of misery either. “It took me to understand: This wall cannot be torn down,” sings Andreas Spechtl in “Mama Made This Boy”.
The most beautiful and cleverest political music in the German-speaking world
On the cover of “Don’t Play With The Rich Kids” the four band members stand wrapped in a blanket, all looking in the same direction: allegory of Fortress Europe or an expression of a new class consciousness? In any case, yes, panic proves: focusing on inner strengths (of the collective?) does not have to exclude the crises out there. And so the Austrians once again create the most beautiful and cleverest political music in the German-speaking world. “For a moment I was lost to the world / I was lost in Berlin, lost in Vienna, lost in Mexico City,” sums up Spechtl at the beginning. It is a piece about the interchangeability of places and experiences. Then the saving insight: “J,P Supernova remains the only drug.”
“Kung Fu Fighter” also tells of modern life’s lies and the “thousand fights inside me”. The song takes on almost Arcade Fire-like proportions with its anthemic backgrounds and horns. Only the Salvation Army is left out. Yes, panic dances around every pathos trap in dreams. They ask themselves what they should be afraid of since they will wake up in hell anyway (“Dream 12059”). They don’t give a shit about death in “Hey Reina” because they have completely different enemies and they are waiting to be seduced by the “devils”. They believe in a certain “change” and at the same time build a house of darkness in “Fascism Is Invisible (Why Not You?)”. And at the end, in the almost twelve-minute white noise of “Ushuaia,” there is immortality. These songs are not free of utopia. You just have to listen a little more closely.