Local sound from the Upper Palatinate

"Sometimes I'm a philistine and then I'm a bon vivant and then I'm a sunshine and then I'm like sour wine". When Susi Raith & die Spießer sing about this in several voices and accompanied by easy-going major chords on guitar and ukulele, it sounds as light, cheerful and full of joy as life can be. We are all just the way we are. Everyone has rough edges and everyone can be a bourgeois at times. How simple. How liberating. How sympathetically human and at the same time musically top-class.

Witty stories

That's how they are, Susi Raith and her philistines. For almost 20 years, as one half of the Raith sisters, she sang easily across several pitches, sometimes powerful and concise, sometimes delicate and soft. Since 2019, she has been accompanied by three well-traveled multi-instrumentalists with diverse inspirations from classical music, folk music, pop and rock. Passionate musicians, like themselves, who can also sing in several voices and play in many different ways. In addition to keyboards, guitars and basses, they also pluck the ukulele, swing the quetschn and play the drums.

In between, the four musicians like to tell funny stories from the sewing box. The sound from their home region, the Upper Palatinate, is clearly audible, but with its very own timbre: sometimes with gentle melodies, but never kitsch! Sometimes poppy, sometimes driving rock and louder, but no noise! Sometimes soulful, but not pathetic and mostly in dialect.

From everyday life to the pain of love

Guitarist and bassist Jochen Goricnik, the band's rock representative, whom many know from the Ringlstetter band, adds the right pinch of rock'n'roll to his arrangements. All of this over the grounding and at the same time flying light sound carpet that Sebastian Stitzinger lays out with keyboards and quetschn and over which he easily sings a third voice - and that in the highest tones. Max Seelos, whose name is also known from bands such as Keller Steff, the son of jazz legend Ambros Seelos, always provides the right groove.

They all contribute musically and with creative songwriting, write their lyrics from time to time, mourn the pain of love or pour themselves into the happiness of love, rejoice over a child's smile in Nepal, comment with a wink on everyday situations that everyone knows and that are simply annoying. The much-sung-about Bavarian beer is not a topic in the songs. The four of them prefer to drink it and dig a little deeper thematically.