Pendler - We Went From Destruction

Too Huge for Love

The most exciting music often comes from musicians who have their roots somewhere else entirely. Sabine Marte (SV Damenkraft), Markus Marte (Mose) and Oliver Stotz (Gustav & Band) are no exception and, alongside other music projects, have long had and still have their own work as a video and performance artist, a sound engineer, and a guitarist before coming together to form the trio Pendler and beginning to trace their own path between Folk, Pop and electronic sounds.

With Black Neoprene, one of the highlights on ‘We Went From Destruction’, a second album by no means poor in such highlights, the three musicians prove how far their flirt with the pop song — which is probably far more than a flirt, and has actually long represented a veritable passion — has grown. Fortunately, their background protects them, however, from falling back onto old pop song clichés. Anybody who hears Pendler does not have to endure the personal heartaches of the individuals concerned, nor badly disguised personal experiences or lukewarm emotions in the lyrics. Pendler is too huge for love. Wouldn’t you agree?

Or perhaps not. I’m too Huge for Love is the key line on this record. The one that sticks, a line that nobody would object to seeing emblazoned on the T-shirts of the young. Of course when somebody insists too loudly the opposite is usually true. Love is, alongside anxiety and fear and other states of psychological emergency, a subject that runs through all nine songs on the album. Once again, the moving song Black Neoprene (Text: Gerda Klingenböck), in which a man is swimming for his life after his ship has sunk. With no land in sight he draws a résumé: “I don’t wail for my army / Those fine Spanish ships / Not the men not the failure / So naked and stripped / Cause without my bold ships / I will take to the stream / To remember your love / Nobody has seen.” Death is knocking already. And if it isn’t thoughts of a love that is no more that are keeping the swimmer warm, then it’s his neoprene suit: “There is nothing so bad / About black neoprene / It keeps you warm / When you have miles to swim.” Goose pimples.

Pendler’s lyrics are strong in imagery; the sounds augment the lyrics, adding strokes, colour and contrast. It is no coincidence that Marte, Marte and Stotz refer to the videos accompanying their tracks as the fourth member of their band. Whereby the songs sometimes represent complete films in their own right. What other group would think of writing a song about David Lynch’s Inland Empire where they attempt a kind of recap of the confusing filmic images? Which would be interesting on a theoretical level in any case, if the track didn’t hit home as rhythmically delicate electro-dub without any explanatory subtitles. In the following track One Step Away the narrator then steps into the film herself: “I wanna walk into — into a horror film — and then I speak to him.” The structure of the track follows the images, a party scene has a background sound that suggests a funky Hip-Hop rhythm. And again, it is effective even if the listener does not pay any attention to the lyrics or the interdisciplinary allusions.

Pendler’s work clearly offers more to the attentive listener. In the final track We Went the trio leaves most of the vocals to brief excerpts taken from films. This poses the questions: Are we really us? Are we a band, or aren’t we really comprised of 100,000 ideas, influences and images we’ve seen? “Who is you? / Who are we? / We gather around a microphone / Like having something in common.” Incidentally, these words could have been uttered by the Log Lady in Twin Peaks.

Pendler’s music is experimental and independent, sometimes with an easygoing flow, sometimes very dynamic, a hybrid of Folk, Pop and electronic sounds that is beautiful to listen to and fantastically arranged by Oliver Stotz, and so well-grounded in and of itself that a lazy “it sounds like…” reference hardly seems necessary. Apart from The Notwist perhaps, but this comparison is really nothing to be ashamed of.

Enough words. Somebody please send this album to David Lynch a.s.a.p.
Kill the lights, roll the sound.