BONGEN’S – Blank

With “Blank,” BONGEN’S presents its fourth album. The band from Cologne, Olpe, and Wuppertal makes German-language music somewhere between singer-songwriter pop and indie rock. Normally, the group led by brothers Mario (vocals, guitar, keys) and Oliver Bongen (guitar) performs as a classic four-piece band, but recently they have been appearing more and more often as an unplugged duo. The new album reflects this, with the instrumentation largely reduced to acoustic guitar and piano.

“Damals überm Steinbruch,” for example, consists exclusively of voice and piano. The fact that some of the songs come across as ‘unfinished’ was entirely intentional. They were meant to sound sketchy. Rough. Raw. “Bare,” in other words.

After the multi-layered arrangement of the previous album “Fragebuch,” the question this time was: What can we leave out?

A minimalism that reveals the core of the music: straightforward, earthy, sometimes rough storytelling. The stories tell of failure in everyday life. Of survival in a consumer society. Of renewal and forgetting. And of the good sides of the apocalypse. There are memories of a village youth, a (fictional) family history spanning decades, and finally the comforting prospect of a chaise longue in a retirement home.

All of the pieces share a subtle insight into the depths of human nature, yet still manage to find a spark of hope somewhere. For example, in lines such as these: “A light still burns in the graveyard of opportunities.” Or: “Heaven is a spot somewhere in the chest.”

Tracklist:

1. Neuer Schnee
2. Stück Papier
3. Es zieht ein Sturm auf
4. Krankenhausclown
5. Damals überm Steinbruch
6. Der Geist von Alois Bongen
7. Gegen das Nichts
8. Schmutzige Töne
9. Besser als der Tod
10. Wenn ich wieder zu mir komm