Guitar pop – Hello cheerfulness, hello mediocrity!

There are many great properties of music. One is that in her best moments, including her suggestive power, she has the ability to apparently run objective facts into her opposite. So it was actually an endless summer 2013 when a band called the cheerfulness, which was still largely unknown to me at the time, tried to convey the following: “Everything is so new and exciting.” That was the name of her debut album “Heart of Gold” the year before. And unlike joy front woman Stella Sommer, who performed the lines with undisguised boredness, I actually started to believe them.

Three other, all of great albums followed until 2019. And regardless of whether the songs “Every day is a small century”, “Pop & death” or “the love of a people”, and whether Sommer voice with their sonorous voice “All people like” sang me or Cary Grant asked whether there was still room for them: The special thing about this band was that they always took the mouth a bit more than it was in terms of. Understatement was common indie cosmos. So the band itself could help the gray, nasty slush in January afternoon to a little residual gloss.

Well, almost exactly six years after “what happened”, the fifth cheerfulness album follows with “black magic”. To anticipate it: unlike the four predecessors, this album is almost completely lacking in magical moments. This has two main causes: On the one hand, summer decided differently than on the previous albums to make their vocals more variable. A more variability is and is not a bad idea in itself. So far, however, it was primarily her characteristic old voice, sometimes Gothic and sacred, which defered the reference from Hildegard Knef to Nico, which was desperately used, and thus made the essence of the songs. You are looking for it in vain on the new album. Instead, summer sings a whole corner higher and – even more regretful – noticeably sober and more ordinary.

The other, much more valid reason: The 13 songs on “Black Magic” are good guitar folk pop songs-but unfortunately no longer. Pieces such as “dark clouds”, “black magic” or “rain” in the cold February are still excellently arranged and instrumented. However, this cannot hide the fact that, like the other ten songs, they lack the very big moments and melodies that can still be bullied after months, let alone years. Even after hearing several times, only isolated lines nest in the audio courses. One of the few light turns of the album is the Dark-Noir ballad “If something beautiful dies”, in which the songwriteric potential in summer flashes for a short moment.

With its four previous albums, the cheerfulness of the widespread thesis defeated that the history of the guitar pop had long since been countered. If you hear “black magic”, you start to give this thesis to believe. Because the band goes to where the majority of their guild is already: into mediocrity.

The cheerfulness: “Black Magic” (Buback/Indigo)