Malicious at its best: Tilman Rossmy and his discourse rock are back in top form.
It’s always nice when people do what they do best. Like Tilman Rossmy. “When love calls,” he sings in the piece of the same name, “I don’t think twice, I’ll take the job.” Rossmy also generously refrains from reading the terms and conditions when Cupid’s arrow hits him, and he recites all of it like a snarling dog defending its last bone against younger competition.
One could now say that Rossmy was always very old, even when he had just started school in Hamburg, he was good for these little malicious things and cynicism. And now that he’s reached legal retirement age with his government’s new album, NUR, he’s finally as old as his voice and lyrics always sounded. This voice is even able to sing self-improvement advice, largely without the embarrassment of strangers: “If you really want to be free, you just have to know who you are.”
And then he takes a close look again, sees the Buddha figure from the hardware store, remembers his first LSD trip and, in the great “light”, slips into the coat of the guy whose world is just going off the rails. Rossmy misses life and happiness and love and everyday life as sensitively as few, and how it all fits together, while The Government plays bone-dry rock, which is exactly what that surly voice needs when it gives you another: “The best what you can give is nothing.”