Indie pop that sips after its own post-romanticism.
“We traveled in the time machine, from one day to the next,” reports singer Andreas Fischer in the last song from DIE ZÄRTLICHKEIT. And then he picks up the chorus and adds a lilting “In my dreams, in my dreams.” The guitars paint a small wall of sound around it, just enough so that you can still follow this jingle-jangle dream machine and a little too little to be able to distinguish a decisive color in this song. The Cologne band moves in this area of tension between too much and too little on this debut LP, the four musicians actually do it with a lot of sensitivity and yet this music is missing something.
In the songs, Tenderness explores the development of our relationships, the past that can no longer be brought back, the lack of orientation and the abysses of life and finds good words for it: “How it hisses / How it crawls / Like a cold reptile / I protect it / And become a fossil myself.” Take courage and step out of the shadows is the call elsewhere.
But the band doesn’t really take advantage of this opportunity on their indie-pop-post-romantic course; guitar, bass and drums shuffle along behind the stories. And it’s the same thing with dreams, they make the world forget so quickly: “I can’t give myself away, I’m dreaming of you here. And while I’m dreaming here, you free me from me,” Fischer sings in the song “A Short Path.”