24 songs, you have to work your way through them first. In the streaming age, it seems unheard of to churn out so much content at once instead of throwing it at the listener bit by bit, drop by drop, to keep it attractive and interesting to the algorithms. But Stella Sommer doesn’t have it with streaming anyway: apart from the singles, SILENCE WORE A SILVER COAT will not be found in its entirety on the relevant portals – if you want to hear it, you have to get involved with the total work of art. You have to bring it first. But Stella Sommer, who inspires both solo and in a duo with Drangsal as Mausis and of course as the mastermind of the Die Heiterkeit Popdeutschland project, makes no compromises.
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The songs, which, by the way, she produced here for the first time entirely on her own, do not belong on any playlist, they are chopped up, detached from one another and reassembled. No, the songs are their own playlist that you can fall into like a freshly fluffed feather blanket. But while you lie there and want to be carried away by her reduced folk and her concise dark voice (which doesn’t sound like Hamburg or Berlin at all, but like Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury), these sentences stick: “In my darkness there’s a spare room for you,” she sings on “In My Darkness.”
SILENCE WORE A SILVER COAT comes closer to the ideal of timeless music than most acoustic imitators dare to dream
With her words, Sommer paints dense, atmospheric pictures that are just as gloomy as they carry a glimmer of hope. She lets her vocals float spherically over organ arrangements and strings, reduced piano accompanies reverberant choirs (“Winter Queen (In Summer)”) and dramatic crescendos that lead to feather-light dreamscapes (“A Special Kind Of Lostness”) and clatter somewhere in the distance Castanets. Why not. Electronic experiments? Not here: Stella Sommer remains completely handmade, but without committing herself to cheap nostalgia and “everything was better in the past”.
No, SILENCE WORE A SILVER COAT comes closer to the ideal of timeless music than most acoustic imitators dare to dream. A total of sixty songs, says Sommer, she wrote for this album – but the final selection offers the perfect balance between uniformity in sound and tension through different tempos and song structures, but also between vague fogginess and precise focus – a thick, rich carpet of sound spreads out off, sometimes you can almost touch it, lie down in it, then it curls up again, moving away from the listener.
And in terms of content? Sommer does not deny it: Everything is bad, loneliness, darkness, ghosts of the past scurry through the night. But there is a way out, she shows us the bright sun rising behind all the dead trees of our present and sings us lullabies for the morning after the apocalypse. Sunny Laurel Canyon nostalgia meets wintry black romance made in Germany: Stella Sommer gives us an album that will warm us through the gas crisis and energy prices for a whole winter.
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