Jens Friebe’s new album seems like a triumphant return, although the Berlin musician hasn’t really gone away – and the last record from 2018 was very good too. But four years is a long time – and how terrible was the second half of it please? The eleven songs of WIR SIND SCHÖN hug us all the more comfortingly: It’s about exhaustion (“The No Longer Can”), class differences (“The Shrinking City”) and taking drugs to function in neoliberalism (“Microdoser”) – but the negative doesn’t win the upper hand.
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A melancholy, but nevertheless delicately optimistic euphoria grows out of the fucked-up of the recent past. The lyrics are concrete and ambiguous at the same time, especially “Der Wahn” is simply grandiose in this respect (“I am the current on the bathing beaches / I hibernate in the partitions”). Musically, Friebe proceeds almost minimalistic after the experimental collective work FUCK PENETRATION, originally the songs were only to be recorded with a drum machine and electric piano.
This basis left room for the input of proven companions such as Chris Imler or Hermann Herrmann; Achan Malonda and Pola Schulten provide background vocals that are far more than that, but an essential part of songs like the agitational anthem “Sing It To The Converted”. The pieces groove and shimmer in a way that seems to be constantly perfected from record to record – even a classic like Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”, which he translates literally into German, sounds as if it actually came from Friebe.
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