Is this perhaps called “Maritime Desert Rock”?
Photo: Danny Kötter
The sea is blue – blue like the blues. A style of music that you don’t initially associate with seafaring, just as you don’t associate it with country (the country is already in the name), folk or jazz. But just as every river flows into the sea at some point, the Berlin band Ahab’s Left Leg turns these mainland music into an ocean of sound. They open up a very obscure category: “Maritime Folk Rock”. Uuuh, that sounds uncool! What’s more, the band looks like a string quartet that drives you wild: fairly young men in vests and shirts (two shirt buttons open), all bearded, two with long hair. Whoever may find this uncool; Such indifference to the Berlin bohemian zeitgeist is quite impressive.
nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter
With our weekly newsletter nd.DieWoche look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.
And behind the adjective “maritime” there is no old-fashioned seafaring romanticism, rather the music itself is like the sea – it waves back and forth without any genre boundaries. Sometimes you are overwhelmed by the sound waves of electric guitars (is that what you call “maritime desert rock”?), sometimes you immerse yourself in songs like quietly waving seaweed gardens where the delicate tentacles of jellyfish spread out.
This is really only “rock” in the remotest sense, because here, either Dionysian lust or destructiveness is celebrated along a predictable four-four meter to the tried-and-tested pattern of verse – chorus – verse.
The band borrows rhythmic and structural freedom from jazz, so that at times it sounds like the quiet parts of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Then again she stomps around in a deliberately primitive way to the sounds of a banjo or plays a morbid samba – a contradiction in adiecto! And vocally there’s a lot on offer here too: from the sensual, light tremolo of the jazz singer to the pained cry of the bluesman, from the melancholic intellectuality of the chançonnier to the shirt-sleeved snottiness of the country singer.
The diversity of the music can also be found in the lyrics. While in the abysmal “Doubt” there is pressure as if you were 20,000 miles under the sea, in “Fuck the System” the pressure is released with pleasure. This tongue-in-cheek party hit addresses the contradiction between revolutionary impatience and the prevailing exhaustion: “Fuck the system, but only on days off please / Otherwise I don’t have time for it.”
There you can see: Ahab’s Left Legs are not at all contemporary, but very contemporary. They provide a hopeful, threatening gesture for those who cannot see land but can orientate themselves using the stars.
By the way, it is not known which leg Captain Ahab was missing and which was intact. Schrödinger’s wooden leg: As long as you don’t know, it could be the left or the right one. But it doesn’t actually matter, because: “If everyone I know is sick, what’s healthy?”
Ahab’s Left Leg: “Threatening Gesture” (available via Bandcamp)
judi bola sbobet judi bola sbobet