The Professor heads for the sun, ears burning – on account of new releases by The Delines, Bruit ≤, Thorbjørn Risager & The Black Tornado, Philipp Fankhauser, and Moritz von Eschersheim.
It was one of the first warm days of the year when I steered my old station wagon westward. Riding shotgun was the Rambler, Professor P.’s favorite travel companion across the endless plains of the Here and Now. The sun hung low when Dodge City rose on the horizon like a wayward mirage in the desert called “The End of the World.”* A modestly lively outpost in the sparsely populated lowlands of the complete unknown, known to seasoned locals as “Bremen.” Beyond that – well, there isn’t much, aside from half-forgotten places like Delmenhorst, Leer (as in, “empty”), and Holland.
The saloon in Bremen City, known as the “Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V.,” actually enjoys a good reputation out here in the North-German outback. So we parked the old nag near a stretch of wasteland called “skate park” in the local vernacular and ordered a round of throat-burners at the open-air bar. A pale-yellow brew, concocted in the vestibule of hell and bottled in green glass in some shady backroom. Provisioned thus, we staggered inside – our behinds still chafed from the dusty ride along the old trapper trail A1 – into a building crowned by a red-brick chimney that reaches for the sky and recalls the days when many a bison breathed its last here, as smoke and steam drifted from the old boiler room toward the train tracks.
Surprise awaited us around the corner: all seats, already taken, filled to the last row with older folks dressed either in the functional beige favored by the senior set or in warm oranges and reds from the Hessnatur racks. The local savings bank had given away tickets – so had a radio station – and not everyone there seemed to know what they were in for.
Well, that didn’t apply to the Rambler and the Professor, who had thundered through the Tame West to see what might just be the best band of the present day. The band led by a man who writes the most beautiful songs under the sun, whose novels tear your heart into quarters and then hastily stitch it back together before the last page – a man as likable as he is relevant, whom, my dear book-club friends, most of you may never have heard of. Except, of course, those who memorize every line of my Rhythm and Soul Revue and who will, when I continue my account in more detail in a moment, experience a lovely déjà vu. Stay tuned.
*A little homage to the mother of all bromance road trips …
The Delines – Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom
When the floodlights finally gave up the ghost late that night, the boundary between dream and reality dissolved. The Professor and the Rambler sat out on the Portland Meadows, at a picnic table by the grandstand, where the dust of the last race still hung in the air. The crowd, unsure what came next now that night had swallowed the racetrack, gathered around the concession stands. It was One-Dollar Beer Night, which had drawn more folks in worn-down cowboy boots and coats designed in decades past than usual.
Cans flew from coolers into thirsty hands. At our table sat the following characters: a short woman who worked as a jockey on second-rate tracks whenever her knee let her; a gay horse trainer in far-too-short shorts and a wide smile marked by age and One-Dollar Beer, reminiscing about former glory; an artist with a cheeky houndstooth cap perched on his bald head, offering comments on life best left uncommented on; and Willy Vlautin, musician and writer.
Right here on these mostly empty grandstands, Vlautin had written his novel Lean on Pete, the story of a parentless teenager who embarks on a journey into the unknown with a racehorse destined for the slaughterhouse. He was also the guitarist and singer of Richmond Fontaine, a Portland band whose Vlautin-penned songs told brittle stories of half-failed lives, of washed-up characters looking for a scrap of luck, framed by soulful, heart-worn neo-country chords. Those were the days, friends. The circumstances that led to that evening, and where it took us afterward – that’s another story for another time … it bubbled to the surface of the conscious when the Rambler and the Professor recently traveled to see The Delines at the Schlachthof. The Delines is Vlautin’s current band, founded over a decade ago after Richmond Fontaine ended, built around the Texas-born singer Amy Boone. “Amy,” he said in Bremen, “is the reason we’re a band.” That’s no empty compliment. The way Boone, backed by the gentlest grooving band, gives Vlautin’s melancholic short stories a voice that shifts uniquely between fragility and strength – that’s rare, towering art.
So, my friends, listen to The Delines’ new album Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom. Two tracks to sample: “Sitting On The Curb”: a broken woman sits on a curb watching the house of her failed marriage burn – wrapped in a mild, swinging jazz-soul-folk arrangement. “Nancy & The Pensacola Pimp”: the band’s dynamic, powerful side – Boone’s voice digging deeper, supported by a sparse, funky guitar, a driving rhythm section, and an organically pulsing organ.
One more thing: I wholeheartedly recommend Vlautin’s new novel The Horse. The story of a former casino musician who, during a winter storm, encounters a blind horse and in the process revisits his life – this is Hemingway plus Steinbeck times ten.
Label: Decor Records
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/96
Bruit ≤ – The Age of Ephemerality
Professoral Advisory: Set your volume way low before hitting play unless you want to experience the same event that I did in my old shotgun shack and which sent the woodworms flying out of their holes and the three-legged tomcat exiling himself behind the shed.
You may ask why The Age of Ephemerality gets coverage in Prof. P.’s Rhythm and Soul Revue, and in truth, I ask myself the same question. The only answer I have for you is: nothing to lose – or rather: Nothing Toulouse. A karmic misalignment crossed my path with that of the instrumental band Bruit ≤, whose name, with that math-symbol tail, already seems peculiar.
Wasauchimmer. The newly released second album of this Toulouse quartet wrapped every wandering thought in my head into a consciousness-dislodging merry-go-round pogo dance, so I cannot and will not ponder its Rhythm-and-Soul relevance. It becomes very clear very soon that it grooves in a wonderfully absurd way, and that shall be reason enough.
The four musicians also form the live band of the wildly successful French dream-pop/shoegaze duo M83. I sampled some M83 and can understand why one might want to recover occasionally with a bit of noise. Bruit, as the Francophiles among you know, means noise. On their second album, these free-flying artists explore the relationship between humans and technology and the all-powerful reign of algorithms, which is why streaming platforms carry only the track created specifically for that purpose: “Parasite (The Boycott Manifesto).”
The album was recorded in a 160-year-old church in southern France, a space that lets its magnificent cacophonous clarity bloom. Take “Ephemeral”: it opens with a melancholy minor-key intro, organ veils hovering in the air, strings beginning a gentle overture – before the drums slam in brutally, hammering the cymbals as if to describe seventeen wrecking balls demolishing a streaming-service headquarters.
Or “Data”: it begins with the temper tantrum of a bipolar metal-jazz drummer before settling into a moderate pling-plang from which something like a postmodern instrumental blues emerges. Somewhere in there hides a melody that winks at us from time to time.
Label: Pelagic Records
Format: CD, LP, DL
Thorbjørn Risager & The Black Tornado – House of Sticks
Years ago I visited an establishment in a large park next to the local planetarium. Must be ten years now – Thorbjørn Risager had just received the German Record Critics’ Award for Too Many Roads, praised as an especially authentic blues album. What you hear there is the blues of a man who has not been raised in Clarksdale or Chicago, but rather somewhere along Denmark’s Kattegat coast and who, incidentally, was born the same year – 1971 – that the musically accompanied outdoor drinking spree known as Roskilde Festival first took place.
Another concert back then confirmed: the man is good, and his audience wears old leather or jeans jackets from past decades and looks like they dream of Harley road trips on Route 66 but, in the end, prefer a weekend in Travemünde in a VW Tiguan.
I rummage through these dusty professorly memories because I just learned that Risager and his eight-piece band The Black Tornado once again received the German Record Critics’ Award for their latest album House of Sticks – for their ability to write and arrange songs that honor “the genre’s roots and earthiness” while incorporating “contemporary performance and expressive forms.” Well then – when people with degrees in comparative musicology write jury statements…
Just listen: “House of Sticks”: perfect intro rising from a brittle acoustic blues into a minor-key voodoo ballad. “Already Gone”: a grooving rock-boogie-blues that sounds like a lost ZZ Top song from the late ’70s. “Inner Light”: restrained swinging funk with touches of the Crusaders and Motown.
Yes, someone here honors roots while embracing the modern. Or, as we might also say: that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Label: Provogue Records
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/48
Philipp Fankhauser – Ain’t That Something
I’m sometimes puzzled by European artists who book legendary American studios and whose albums then end up on the Professor’s shellac gramophone. I wasn’t convinced when Westernhagen went to New York (Williamsburg), nor when Dutch psychedelic trio DeWolff recorded their Alabama album Muscle Shoals, which didn’t do their credibility any favors.
Now Philipp Fankhauser: the Swiss blues musician recorded his 18th album partly in southern France and partly – again – in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at the legendary Fame Studios, where Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett found their soul. Ain’t That Something is the title, and I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Fankhauser seems to be – though to be fair, the positively glowing title track was written by Steve Jordan, drummer for B.B. King and Bob Dylan and now the Rolling Stones’ touring drummer, originally for soul heavyweight Solomon Burke.
The soul to which Fankhauser devotes large parts of the album, as well as the excursions into Chicago blues (“Jack in My Back”), funk (“The Undertaker”), and middle-of-the-road Americana (“That’s How I Got to Memphis”), is impeccably produced – every note punctual as a Swiss train – and even a 91-year-old blues legend like guest Bobby Rush gets neatly squeezed into the tight rhythm schedule of precisely engineered Alpine groove.
What I miss is a bit of dirt under the fingernails, some Mississippi mud on polished ground – the rumbling, sometimes stumbling quality of his only near-perfect soul and blues pieces. Now reading these words that, after all, I myself have just written, I wonder: Am I being unfair to Mr. Fankhauser? Could be. That’s the hazard of professorly borderline subjectivism. You might very well like it all a lot, dear friends – and to end this section on a high note: Fankhauser’s version of J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight”: that one I like!
Label: Funk House Blues Prod/Membran
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/44.1
Moritz von Eschersheim – Flausen im Kopf & Flusen im Bauchnabel
Now we turn to a previously neglected subgenre in the international evolution of groove: traffic-clown funk. If that’s too abstract, imagine a well-meaning team of social workers hosting a joint concert by James Brown and “Hexe Knickebein” at an adventure playground on the edge of town. Hexe who?! I hear you ask. Friends – friends! – who among you doesn’t know the global hits “Schmeißfliegenrap” and “Schneck, Wiesel und Liesel”? Faced with such cavernous gaps in knowledge, I shall shake my bald head disapprovingly for ten minutes straight before expanding the Rhythm-and-Soul karma horizon in a different direction.
Enter Moritz von Eschersheim: a Berlin singer-songwriter who decorates himself with a red clown nose, white-painted cheeks, and black ink tears. From what I could gather, he has composed for Tatort and children’s films and recently won an award for best political song for “Hand,” which he dedicated to those monochrome-acting after-work intersection-blockers of the Last Generation – why not.
Now he’s taken a further step: his debut album. And the Professor would like to recommend it to all who meet this world – truly falling apart at the seams – with a certain default grimness. This is a wonderfully delightful album; the title alone, roughly translating to A Head Full of Fuzz & a Bellybutton Full of Fluff, makes the Professor’s humor synapses flicker cheerfully.
A well-assembled band backs the usually solo cabaret troubadour with a fiery mix of funk, soul, and traffic-clown exuberance. Reggae bubbles, blues laments, and straightforward rock riffs grumble with joy. Alongside von Eschersheim’s guitar and a suspiciously groovy rhythm section, we get Clavinet, Rhodes, banjo, and a James-Brown-worthy horn section. For audio connoisseurs cautious about the unknown, here are my track tips: “Panzernashornbabybullenblues” (“Armored-Rhino-Baby-Bull Blues”): only seemingly silly, with surprising soul credibility and proof that even a clown can play some serious funk guitar. “Dieses Lied” (“This Song”): a guitar riff filched from Eminem, meandering toward a Social-Democrat summer party before unfolding into a lovely blues ballad. “Bubble”: a Bob-Marley-Wailers groove with reggae organ and odd lines like “kein Eintrag bei der Schufa” (“no credit-report entry”), but sadly over in 1:32. Conclusion: a must-hear album for anyone suffering from coulrophobia. And for everyone else, too.
Label: Salon Mondial
Format: CD, DL 24/44