Stahlberger's new album: on the highway into alienation

Manuel Stahlberger knows what he wants. Barely on stage in the packed "Kaufleuten" (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), the gaunt, 51-year-old singer shows off his skills. The band serves up garish sounds and boisterous beats. The music takes you away from the stove or fireplace, out into the cold suburbs, into the Mediterranean wilderness. The St. Gallen band leaves behind the comfort of the countryside, as well as the idea of ​​home and any kind of belonging.

Stahlberger will present the recently released album "Immer dur Nächt" in Zurich on Thursday evening. However, the new repertoire doesn't mark a stylistic shift. Rather, it incorporates the themes and driving forces the band has developed over the past decades. This allows old and new songs to occasionally be combined into a single fugue.

More consistently than ever, the focus is on a groove that transforms the pop song genre into the form of a track. There's barely any interplay between verse and chorus; thus, those harmonic loops that, despite all the drama in a pop song, always confidently lead back to the opening chord are also missing. Oh, how wonderful it was when you could call from the dominant chord down to the tonic: "Wait, just wait, we'll be home soon!" Stahlberger's music, however, is homeless and roars into alienation like a noisy street, a highway, or a night train with a loud air conditioning.

The musical tension depends on the sonic dynamics created by the four accompanying musicians on keyboards, guitars, bass, and drums. They know exactly what they're doing, like workers in a machine room. They make the rhythm boil and pulsate; live, it sounds rockier, earthier than on the studio recordings.

With their lush electro-rock, the band brings an atmosphere of industrial coldness and global destiny to the concert hall. Manuel Stahlberger, with his sober dialect, provides a human and ironic contrast. His singing isn't a protest against the inhuman noise, but rather a laconic account of hopeless fatalism.

Traces of home and identity seem to be preserved in the dialect texts. But given the St. Gallen tendency toward guttural sounds, one might think that Stahlberger's words would rather go back into one's throat. Much like Stahlberger himself, who conjures up a return—to the beginning of the story, or to the womb. In "Ales nomol zruck" (All back to the cave), he sings suggestively: "Ales nomol zruck i die Höhli, dur en schlifrige Gang."

The tendency to withdraw is clearly a reaction to the fear of the end. Stahlberger does indeed conjure up end-time fears in several songs. In "Fluss," a pair of lovers lose control and a sense of the future. "Verbii" is about personal life—about a final period of time before death, in which one can experience normality one last time before everything is over. Finally, "Ewige Summer" is a truly topical, political observation: Stahlberger compares the present crisis to the end of summer vacation.

Stahlberger delivers the new repertoire with commitment and confidence. The fact that the applause is rather modest isn't due to a lack of quality. But the disastrous tracks and laconic lyrics aren't conducive to creating euphoria and triggering loud applause. In fact, one is glad that the band also performs the old song "Hei zu dir" at some point: a love song that offers some comfort and warmth.