Erdmöbel Live¶
495 words on German Music , Live
Erdmöbel played in Göttingen tonight. They played in electroosho which is notorious for starting gigs notoriously late. Posters said doors open at nine and the gig starts at ten. So I indulged in dinner and telly until ten and then left to go there… of course arriving hopelessly early and having to wait until eleven or so before the band played. I didn’t meet anybody I knew there, so I had to spend that time sitting right between a conversation about how some drummer was too dull on my right and a conversation about who’s knowing more gay couples with a significant age difference on my left.
But eventually sitting through this was worth it. I had assumed the band to not be exactly young as Jörg first introduced me to their music when we were freshers. And they are even a little bit older more mature than that. Eventually they had a singer/guitarist, a drummer, a bassist, a keyboarder and a trombonist on stage but they started off in a very slow and cool way, starting out with some electronic percussion and then very slowly and carefully, the drums, bass and guitar joining in before everything started off a few minutes later. At these slow speeds, it’s not rock’n’roll, of course, but it was never expected to be.
They played a good show to not that many of us who still made the club look reasonably full because it’s very small and the band needing a lot of the space there. It was fascinating to see the bassist play his instrument enthusiastically and carefully, to hear the singer’s typical voice and have a trombone on stage. The drummer was operating equally carefully which I tend to be sceptical about. Not that the sound was bad, but when thinking about drumming, severe physical activity comes to my mind, and a lot of force – which were both missing here. And I’m not entirely sure whether the keyboarder did all that much in the course of the show. In part because I couldn’t really see him, but mostly because they oddly had quite a few piano (and other) snippets coming out of little electronic machines, thus making the real player seem kind of superfluous when he did the playing for a change. I fact, I was surprised by the amount of electronic help they used – with the drummer having some electronica there as well and the bassist having a little device as well which he used quite spectacularly towards the end.
And if you’re into German, you might appreciate their lyrics as well. They’re quite cool and unusual in their subtlety. Check out Nah bei dir, their cover version of Burt Bacharach’s Close To You or the wonderful In den Schuhen von Audrey Hepburn with its nice bass line or Dawai Dawai which I think is the first song of them I knew but which I can only find on a relatively recent album.
