It smells like stale beer. A red wine bottle must have fallen over somewhere. And just next to the ashtray a cigarette butt is smoldering. Just missing some music. Not too wild, just not loud. Slightly melancholic could fit well. Element of Crime for example. With “Morgens um Vier” the band delivers a wonderful soundtrack for the hours somewhere between a nightcap and a hangover. The album will be released this Friday (April 7th).
The band delivered the pictures with the videos for the two singles “Unfocused with Cat” and “Then you come back”. People celebrate, talk, sit at bars, drink, smoke. “It fits in a way because the band also has this kind of history,” says singer Sven Regener of the German Press Agency in Berlin. “We come from this old West Berlin Wall City thing, from a world where people have traditionally and always been beating each other up late.”
The band, founded by Regener, who was born in Bremen, has been on the road musically in this world for almost four decades. In addition to the singer, who is also successful as a writer with the sequel to “Herr Lehmann”, for example, there are also guitarist Jakob Friderichs, drummer Richard Pappik and, since last year, Markus Runzheimer on bass, who replaced the deceased bassist and producer David Young.
Runzheimer had been a substitute for Young for a long time. “That’s why it was a relatively smooth transition,” says Regener. He doesn’t think the second position is that important anymore. “After more than 35 years, a music producer no longer plays such an oversized role in a band like us,” he says. Instructions for recording an album are no longer necessary. “We just need someone as an additional authority who takes a lot off our hands and looks at things from a little more distance.” In Patrick Meyer, someone has been found who fits in well and “knows, understands and appreciates the band very well – that’s the most important thing”.
“The band is alive”
For drummer Pappik, the long time together shows “that the band is alive and wants to continue. Again and again, even if there was a break in between.” None of this was intentional for Regener. “That’s also something you don’t take on and say: Hey, we want to beat this band through this life and the world for as long as possible. No, on the contrary, it’s rather strange that it’s been going on for so long. We don’t think that’s a credit.”
The 15th studio album, including the probably greatest success “Mittelpunkt der Welt” with the hit “Delmenhorst” in 2005, is no surprise musically. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing with Element of Crime. The band has been delivering consistently good songs for years. It’s quiet, not too loud, not too fast.
The style is often reminiscent of Calexico. Especially when Regener’s wonderfully melancholic trumpet solos can be heard. Above all, there is a lot of guitar, sometimes also slided. Then sometimes it sounds like country, which it isn’t. The rock and pop elements are too dominant for that. Ten songs, around 40 minutes full of music that is easy to hear.
In addition, there are Regener’s texts with these sentences, which sometimes seem endless, often stretched out over several musical phrases. For example: “Love is – as Johannes Mario Simmel, you say, rightly called one of his best books – just a word and you say that you don’t miss it that much in everyday life” in “Love is just a word”. It’s a lot about loss (“It’s okay without love”), togetherness (“Only the beginning”), return (“Then you’ll come back”), weird observations (“In the morning at four”) or the sometimes deeper meaning in life Everyday (“Again Sunday”).
“A Totally Unregulated Zone of Consciousness”
For the 62-year-old, writing the songs is clearly different from the big concept of a book. The first ideas always come spontaneously when he has worked long enough on a melody. “It is a completely unregulated zone of consciousness. Therefore it is pure wilderness. The law of the jungle reigns there, only the strongest ideas survive there.”
For the band, lyrics and music must also be stronger than crises, such as the Corona period. “There were always some kind of crises when we made records. That’s the way the world is,” says Regener. “Nevertheless, it’s important that you make music, that you still create songs. So that the world keeps turning!”
