The master of ambivalence is on her way to becoming a pop star.
Alexandra once sang “My Friend, the Tree”. A good half a century later, Mine immediately transforms into the good friend from before: “I’m so old, I’m a tree, I water myself because I’m smart.” You can hear the title track from BAUM – in the tradition of Alexandra Song that marks the tender beginnings of the eco-movement – read as a songful expression of today’s environmental awareness, but also as a personal development story.
That’s exactly what Mine’s art is about on her fifth album: an ambivalence that doesn’t want to be defined and that’s precisely why it remains broadly compatible. Second example: “Shady”, which could be a dialogue with a political activist, but also an examination of a claustrophobic relationship. In “Staub” Mine says goodbye to her mother in the realm of the dead, in “I don’t know it” the Swabian Berliner-by-choice thinks about life. Both are wonderfully elegiac ballads, sparsely orchestrated sometimes with piano and cello, sometimes with a lonely organ – but both still sound lush, almost lavish.
It cannot be fully explained how Mine manages to do this, how her language is on the one hand very simple, sometimes even coarse and yet always poetic, how her voice achieves an immense depth without any vocal contortions, and how she gives a shit about song conventions and still always delivers great, Pop with capital letters. If with BAUM Mine doesn’t finally become the pop star that she should have been since 2019, i.e. since KLEBSTOFF, then this world doesn’t deserve to be saved, by whatever environmental movement.