WILD PINK

In the organizer's words:

Wed., 16.10.24

Admission 8 pm Start 9 pm

Blue Shell Live:

WILD PINK

Alternative Rock Country

"Do you still believe it?" asks John Ross after traveling through the rubble, after singing about thunder rolling down the track and burning in a bottle. These are clichés, and he knows it. It's a moment where he returns to the ancient wisdom of his classic rock forebears and tries to find the answers once more. This is the ground Ross treads in "The Fences Of Stonehenge", the first single, the opening track and the mission statement of the new Wild Pink album "Dulling The Horns". The question echoes throughout the album: "Do you still believe it?" And what happens when you don't believe it anymore?

Ross' answer is to start again. From the late '10s to the early '20s, Wild Pink was on the classic upward trajectory. The otherworldly synth Americana of Yolk In The Fur (2018) earned them press attention and praise, while the widescreen sheen and scope of follow-up A Billion Little Lights (2021) went all out just before the band's breakthrough. Then everything changed: Ross received a shocking cancer diagnosis. Wild Pink's subsequent release, ILYSM (2022), was inevitably burdened with the burden of being an album about mortality and love. On the other hand, Ross began to reimagine Wild Pink.

"Dulling The Horns" is the sound of Wild Pink fraying at the edges. On the other side of his battle with cancer and having to retell the story in an album cycle, he was exhausted - desperate for a new spark, a new story. "You zoom out, and I'm very happy," he continues. "But Dulling The Horns came out of a sense of figuring out how to deal with things, move forward and just keep creating."

In the end, he finds his way back to something like home. Dulling The Horns was almost named after his closing track "Rung Cold", the first song Ross started working on for the album. Instead, it becomes the last word, a final avalanche of modern overstimulation and overdoses of cappuccinos and Czech news on TV in a bank, before Ross finally concludes, "And if you can't handle it, you just gotta move on." Perhaps it's a fittingly world-weary sentiment, an uncertain solution to the indescribable "it" that Ross was still trying to believe in at the beginning of the album. On Dulling The Horns, you can hear him rediscovering fire in real time. Tropes discarded on the side of the road, songs pulled from the formative DNA of rock music, all filtered through years of chaotic fog. "There's no answer to these problems," Ross says, having finally given in. But as far as "Dulling The Horns" is concerned, there is at least one way forward: burn it all and move on.

https://www.wildpinkmusic.com/

https://www.instagram.com/wildpinknyc/

Support:

THE PIONEERS

Singer/songwriter

Dylan, Neil Young, maybe Joni Mitchell and then the references and the possibilities are

and the possibilities are exhausted? Sorry, just no.

The Pioneers from Cologne are firmly rooted in the acoustic songwriting tradition of the late 1960s, but you can hear in each of the 11 songs on their debut album BRONCO that they are always looking to the future.

These tracks could not have been created without a love of 80s and 90s indie, without a dedication to electronic music, without a clear view of the here and now, without the desire to make tomorrow worthwhile - manifested musically and lyrically in a record that sounds as open as the soul of someone who goes to the sea alone in minus 5 degrees and an icy blue sky must feel - smiling face included.

Acoustic guitars dominate the sound, but it's the synth pads on 'If I had the heart', the dreamy piano in 'Pick up a berry' or the organ that nestles against the choruses of 'Anyway much better' that take The Pioneers far away from the fate of being just another good folk combo.

www.the-pioneers.xyz

🎟️ Tickets: 18.- € (plus fee)