Three years ago, a long-term documentary by director Aljoscha Pause entitled “Like a Stranger – A German Pop Music Story” was shown on 3sat. Pause accompanied the German musician Roland Meyer de Voltaire for six years on his way through the trials and tribulations of the music business. Passion, hope, success, disappointment, getting up, carrying on: you got to know an artist for whom music is not an option, but a necessity. Meyer de Voltaire’s band at the time, Voltaire, released various singles, an EP and two albums between 2003 and 2009. The response to this music was great because until then hardly anyone had dealt with the German language so directly and emotionally. He later worked with Megaloh, Enno Bunger and Schiller.
An introspective, artful and touching album from someone who has music within him
Around the same time as the documentary, he presented his music in a new artistic outfit: black. On the debut album, “White Room”, released in 2019, there are modern beats like perhaps those from The xx, a contemporary simplicity, a certain understatement, a darkened elegance and a feeling for electronic sounds, their origins, their connotations. This applies even more to the new album, “Red Pill”. In the documentary someone says that Meyer de Voltaire was able to constantly reinvent himself. But more than that, it’s about loyalty to yourself, your own resonance – the sound changes, but the basic feeling of this music, the longing and wanting to lose yourself, that’s still the core.
For “Red Pill”, the singer and guitarist reduces the production to the bare essentials and leaves a lot of space between programming, electric guitars and synths so that you can look into the depths between the notes. Sometimes you think you can hear Meyer de Voltaire’s old love for Radiohead from afar, which was formative for his former band. More often, however, this music is curious, ultra-modern, compact and electro-pop that is open in all directions, such as that of Billie Eilish, which the artist cites as a reference. An introspective, artful and touching album from someone who has music within him.
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