Spot On: Fenster

As you might know, the lord moves in mysterious ways. And as you already should have mentioned so do we. Sometimes you have to accept these little detours that destiny, the lord or whoever is your shepherd, gives you to follow. And even if we talk just about one little decision, namely listening and liking to a band or not, let me tell you my little story about this band called FENSTER.

Back in the days I saw this highly rated trio from Berlin and what I saw wasn’t actually that satisfying. I had heard of them from friends of friends, like you hear from any new Berlin band. When they finally played their first show in Leipzig, which is somehow the new Berlin or it isn’t, it felt quite boring. A bit of dream pop echoes, some JEFDERSON AIRPLANE tambourines and another cute VELVET UNDERGROUND guitar. That was reliable but not surprising. I left that evening quite disappointed, and this easily had could been my one and only impression of this band.
It took nearly another two years to regard my opinion. Fortunately. At Immergut 2013 usfrom NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION decided to invite the guys to an intimate session. Soon they agreed, and what we get was a beautiful little take in one of the festival’s backstage trailers. Suddenly far away from a 60s band’s sound, but deep into a unique way of playing pop music with fuzzy guitars and rattling drums. Let’s call it the beginning of a summerly love affair.

In 2014 they are back again. Back with a new record, back from a tour through the USA and back to play the perfect soundtrack for this year’s mild summer nights. The Pink Caves is the title of their new longplayer that gives us a look deep inside an imaginary room where the air smells sweetly and time goes slowly. The artwork is already sending postcard-like greetings from a far away place, and the opener Better Days sucks us right into that magical microcosm the band has just timbered for us.

A microcosm that the FENSTER has just build for this album to make the whole thing existing in one world and where all these new songs were born and raised. In an interview JJ Weihl describes this construction as ‘a place that doesn’t really exist, like an imaginary heaven, where you go when you die, but it’s not really clear’ and furthermore names it more colourful to their rather minimalistic, more dry basement like debut Bones.

Recorded in three weeks in a wooden house near the forests of east Germany, that was completely wired to record simultaneously in every room, as singer and guitarist Jonathan Jarzyna explains, the album was mixed some months later in Berlin. An important part of FENSTER‘s sound is as always their focus on sound engineering, made possible by friend and producer Tadklimp as well as the band’s own Rémi Letournelle. Even if it seems like FENSTER‘s favourite and recurring elements are mostly an own version of the classical 50s Americana sound as well as modern pop music and sparely used electronica, The Pink Caves has its own, somehow mysterious flavour, since it’s filled to the brim with those little hidden field recordings of found stuff and broken gadgets, acoustic snapshots and vocal samples, often so deeply below the surface you have to search for them but sometimes surprising enough to wake you up as well.

Grown to a quartet with help of new band member Lucas Chantre, playing guitar and some electronics, they also make an awesome live setup. Songs from their debut standing easily next to the new ones and minimalistic, fragment-like tracks perfectly filling the gaps between those noble arranged pop songs. One of them is 1982 whose broad and dreamful synthesizers reminds us on the year 1982 indeed. Also In The Walls is another of that filigreed chamber pop pieces that sounds like recorded in deep space. Not to forget this beautiful ambiguities like True Love, wrapped in a naïve love song’s habit but overlayed with bitter sweet lyrics sung by JJ Weihl, followed by the darker and pitched down The Light.

With collecting and using their very own and highly versatile box of musical building bricks the band has recorded an album that could be fun for both, those who love experimental and unexpected soundscapes as well as those who searched for 43 minutes of tasteful dispersion. And that is maybe, what The Pink Caves makes so special. FENSTER‘s newest LP is once more able to break such multiple talents down into 12 songs which show their very own conception of pop music. Always sweet but never cheesy, sometimes luxury but always essentially and mostly catchy while staying unmistakable unique.

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FENSTER