C’est Karma – “Amuse Bouche”
The track listing on “Amuse-Bouche” (Backseat), the 20-year-old musician’s EP C’est Karma, reads like a movie night shopping list. There’s “Spaghetti on Repeat”, “Popcorn”, “Gateaux” and a “coffee” to get you through the third film of the evening. In addition, they experiment with loud beats, hopping, echoing sounds, crackling noises and, above all, lots of noise. Only in “Coffee” is there an experimental break: “I cut my hair, paint my nails, my own thoughts taste like crime.” Clattering and murmuring, it gets acoustically easier here: Piano and deep vocals are only backed by softly buzzing, simple beats. During the coffee break she gathers energy for the last song “Popcorn”. A song like a ride in a bumper car. Everything blinks. Everything bangs against each other. In other words: an amusement through and through. Eve Goldbach
The Black Keys – “Dropout Boogie”
On the cover of their eleventh album, “Dropout Boogie” (Nonesuch/Warner), Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney present themselves in Buster Keaton style as working-class representatives – and that’s how they see it Black Keys himself actually. Since 2002, they’ve worked their way from the garage blues holes to the Grammy stage with honest rock ‘n’ roll work. And when you hear this, you have to say: rightly so. The way the two cast their hybrid of vintage sounds and studio trickery, how a big, lively, American atmosphere emerges from catchy glam rock, offbeat ballads and dusty rehearsal room babble, is something that no classic rock band can do as well as they do. Joachim Hentschel
OK Kid – “Three”
With a spectacular, but very unspectacularly named album, reports ok kid return. “Three” (OK Kid), the logical successor to “Zwei”, is finely chilled. Spring is more like a dull winter, with snowflakes in your jacket pocket. It’s about dividing society. It’s about human stupidity. But the trio holds back musically: dull glittering pop, a few keyboards, simple beats, more in the background. And above that a battle of metaphors like a “single wetland of too much sensory overload”. The earth is burning and everyone should bathe in brain rain so that egos no longer rule. Not quite round, but okay. Eve Goldbach
Florence + The Machine – “Dance Fever”
During the pandemic, Florence Welch, aka Florence + The Machine, read into the phenomenon of choreomania. A kind of group ritual. You dance, obsessively and to the point of total exhaustion. A case has been handed down from the Middle Ages in which 400 women are said to have died in this way. The Brit also dealt intensively with horror films. Those were scary times, and for Welch, she revealed on the release of her new album, one way to deal with “getting scary yourself.” Said and done. “Dance Fever” (Universal Music) is a very beautiful, somberly radiant indie alternative work that revels and drifts and rebels, ducks away, springs back up, startles the world and seems to fear itself in the process. Above all, though, it does something that perhaps cannot be overestimated: it dances against the terrible fears of the time. Jacob Biazza
Moderate – “More D4ta”
Six years after its predecessor, “More D4ta” (Monkeytown Records) is finally available moderate. The trio is more relaxed and slower on the new album. The title alludes to the permanent sensory overload in the music, which one obviously wants to counteract here. Always slightly dreamy, the vocals deep and distorted, a lot of hissing, from time to time mechanical rattling. In addition, tonal curiosities such as synthesizer birdsong. Altogether something between pop, dance and minimalistic techno. “More Love” is an exception. A song. “The night is warm, the night is gone/ She keeps on dancing”. Lots of melancholy, but that doesn’t keep me from dancing. Eve Goldbach