STARING GIRL

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STARING GIRL

"Slanting Light"

Music can be something healing. Headphones on and into a shared feeling. A remedy against loneliness.

The Hamburg band Staring Girl manages to do just that with their third album "Schräg fällt das Licht" (released in 2023). In their songs, whole worlds open up, through which singer and songwriter Steffen Nibbe leads "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 asks fundamental questions, starting from the everyday.

On the 13 new songs, Nibbe's rhythmically played guitar is carried by intricate bass runs (Frenzy Suhr, Gunnar Ennen), atmospheric drumming (Lennart Wohlt), piano and organ sounds (Gunnar Ennen) and many electric guitars (Jens Fricke, Gunnar Ennen). They are joined by lapsteel, synths, Wurlitzer, winds, strings, marimba and vibraphone. Soundscapes combine sprawling guitar solos with confident pop, which is definitely new to the Staring Girl cosmos.

The opener "Menschen in Geschichtsbüchern" sets the tone: light as a feather, it leads into the album, which overall seems to move with light steps towards a brighter future. "Love is of everything the greatest" has, appropriately enough, perhaps the greatest musical power on the album. "Love is of all the greatest / And when it ends, too," Nibbe sings. Drums, bass and a slightly bluesy, old acoustic guitar with half-rusted strings rattle like an old diesel engine. In addition, an old transistor organ, which sometimes dives into spacey expanses, before Fricke's guitar breaks loose at the end, as if it wants to sing, scream and cry at the same time. But the heart 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 how it will be, we don't know." On "Parking Lot," the drums groove, rumble and clang, a slightly out-of-tune piano oscillates somewhere between honkytonk and reggae leanings. 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, where despite all the dystopia, hope clearly lights the way: "And they walk under the indifferent stars of the night / Till the trees strike out again and then bloom beautifully / Why not yet? Why not now? / Because the darkness doesn't yet understand." In general, light is a central motif. And where there is light, there is also shadow, as is well known. Thus, the protagonists of the songs are repeatedly exposed to the play between brightness and darkness. But in the last piece of the record it says: "Everything turns to the light / Now also I." (In the Park)

Since their last album "In einem Bild" (2018) and the "EP" released a year later, a lot has happened. Nibbe became a father, Wohlt joined the band as a new drummer and Corona dictated a new way of working: In the summer of 2020, basic ideas emerged from Nibbe's song fragments in the drummer's small garden house, which were later developed into finished songs with the whole band. The album was recorded in live sessions at WattnSound Studio/Niebüll and Kornboden/Bardüttingdorf. Ennen, who also served as the album's main producer, recorded additional details in his studio, playing marimba and vibraphones, an old Moog synthesizer, hired trombones and flugelhorns, and even an entire string quartet for two tracks.

As members of the first band around Gisbert zu Knyphausen, as musicians and actors in Andreas Dren's film "Gundermann", for which they also recorded the soundtrack, or as parts of the band Nullmillimeter, members of Staring Girl were and are active. Staring Girl itself has played joint concerts with artists such as Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Erdmöbel, Fortuna Ehrenfeld and DOTA.

The band is almost indifferent to their 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 parts.

If you take off the headphones at the end of the album, then with the certainty that you will no longer be distracted "by the lostness of the world". "The way home we will always find," says the last title of the album.

Admission: 20:00