The Cologne songwriter explores how the private collides with the social.
As is well known, Tragically Hip with a “The” at the front are a Canadian rock band. With Fortuna Ehrenfeld, “Tragically Hip” becomes a warmly unironic swan song to a love: “The longing is just paddling and the mood is back.” Or is it an entire generation that Martin Bechler sends lines that only he can write like that? Underneath the song that closes GLITZERSCHWEIN there is a piano, nothing else – that’s exactly how it was with “On the corner a dog barks”, the opening in which “death” rhymes with “my car is in a no-parking zone”. .
The two pieces both play with the heritage of the very German art song, but above all they form a bracket that is repeatedly broken up with experiments up to the dry, deliberately dull electro beat. But let’s be honest, the musical implementation doesn’t matter a bit because it’s all about the words, which are sometimes strung together breathlessly and then, as in “When our present was science fiction”, embedded in astonishingly intoxicating melodies.
It is not only there that Bechler negotiates how the private collides with the social, but above all life remains. Also in “Revolution No. 9” or “We propagate excess” you can listen to him think through the eternal dilemma. Fortuna Ehrenfeld doesn’t find any answers that will help you move forward on her eighth album, but she does at least find a few rhymes that help a little to get over the fact that we’re all damned. And now everyone together: “Shalala, the world out there can support us.”