NEW MUSIC from Germany

Filed Under: Excited About — By: Oliver Bouchard

New Music from Germany

We’re off to a holiday visit to our home country and that s a good reason to introduce some new music from Germany. However, when I compiled the World Cup playlist this summer, to my surprise I realized how hard it was to find contemporary Germany music that I like and even our friends in their 20s couldn’t really help us. So I had to resort mostly to old songs I remembered from back in the time.

And even then, many of them were not sung in German. That has been a thing for a long time, with a brief interruption by the (Neue Deutsche Welle)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Deutsche_Welle]: if you wanted to do serious rock music, you had to sing in English. So do all the following bands.

Oracles

We met members of the Oracles, a five-piece from Berlin, at a CMJ show at Mercury Lounge, but we couldn’t make it to one of their shows. Oracles use an eclectic mix of styles – the result sounds very 70s for me, without feeling dated. The video is pretty cool too.

Fenster

Fenster is a German-American band, but they reside in Berlin and have a German name (“Window”), so they qualify for this list. “Dream Pop” is their thing, psychedelic guitars, combined with synths and alternating female and male vocals. Something to put on on a Sunday afternoon and let your thoughts wander.

Dena

Dena, the stage name of Denitza Todorova from Berlin, does a very peculiar brand of dancey, poppy hip hop: she strips the genre from bling and glitter and transports it to the gritty parts of Berlin, like a sports field at night or a flee market under deep hanging grey clouds.

Ballet School

And then there is Ballet School, the three piece from Berlin.