Live: Staring Girl (IndieFolkPopAmericana aus Hamburg) + Support: tba

In the organizer's words:

Staring Girl

Music can be healing. Put on your headphones and immerse yourself in a shared feeling. A remedy for loneliness.

The Hamburg band Staring Girl achieves just that with their third album "Schräg fällt das Licht" (2023). Entire worlds open up in their songs, through which singer and songwriter Steffen Nibbe leads us "past all the houses, all the trees and squares / Past all the people who love and hurt each other" (parking lot) - in a prose that soberly poses fundamental questions based on the everyday.

On the 13 new songs of their third album "Schräg fällt das Licht", Nibbe's rhythmically played guitar is carried by playful bass lines (Frenzy Suhr, Gunnar Ennen), atmospheric drumming (Lennart Wohlt), piano and organ sounds (Gunnar Ennen) and many electric guitars (Jens Fricke, Gunnar Ennen). These are joined by lapsteel, synths, Wurlitzer, wind instruments, strings, marimba and vibraphone. Soundscapes combine sprawling guitar solos with self-confident pop, which is definitely new in the Staring Girl cosmos.

The opener "Menschen in Geschichtsbüchern" (People in History Books) sets the tone: light as a feather, it leads into the album, which seems to move with light steps towards a brighter future. "Die Liebe ist von allem das Größte" ("Love is the greatest of all") has, in keeping with the title, perhaps the greatest musical power on the album. "Love is the greatest thing of all / And when it ends too," sings Nibbe. Drums, bass and a slightly bluesy, old acoustic guitar with half-rusted strings rattle like an old diesel engine. There's also an old transistor organ, which sometimes dives into spacey expanses before Fricke's guitar breaks loose at the end, as if it wanted to sing, scream and cry at the same time. But the centerpiece of the record is "Schräg fällt das Licht". Nibbe describes a kind of personal world event. A newborn child lies before the protagonist and illuminates his world: "It's good the way it is. And we don't know how it will turn out." In "Parkplatz", the drums groove, rumble and rattle, a slightly out-of-tune piano oscillates somewhere between honkytonk and reggae. A song that lives in the here and now, because "until everything falls apart again at the end, we still have time". In addition to the many inner worlds that are negotiated on the album, "Leuchten" is also a commentary on the times, a parable for the war in Syria, Ukraine or elsewhere, in which hope clearly lights the way despite all the dystopia: "And they walk under the indifferent stars of the night / Until the trees sprout again and then bloom beautifully / Why not now? Why not now? / Because the darkness does not yet understand." In general, light is a central motif. And where there is light, there is also shadow. The protagonists of the songs are repeatedly exposed to the interplay between light and darkness. But the last track on the record says: "Everything turns to the light / Now I do too." (In the park)

As members of the first band around Gisbert zu Knyphausen, as musicians and actors in Andreas Dresen's film "Gundermann", for which they also recorded the soundtrack, or as part of the band Nullmillimeter, members of Staring Girl were and are active. Staring Girl themselves have played concerts with artists such as Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Erdmöbel, Fortuna Ehrenfeld and DOTA. The band is almost indifferent to its own big musical breakthrough, as it is all about the love of music, which as a healing force can be more than the sum of its individual parts.

When you take off your headphones at the end of the album, you can rest assured that you will no longer be put off by "the lostness of the world". "We will always find our way home", says the last track on the album.

Support: tba