Leaving the somewhat bleak and interchangeable city center toward the Old Harbor, just before crossing the steel bascule bridge at the customs quay and passing the Maritime Accident Command Center on the left, you'll almost reliably find the small Knobloch fish shack there every day. Its owner probably suspected years ago that there was no better place in all of Cuxhaven to offer shipwrecked revelers, after their last dinner, a proper crab sandwich to take with them on their walk to the Alte Liebe, the sentimental landmark of this city at the mouth of the Elbe into the rough North Sea, where they'll then wave melancholically and a little tipsy to the giant container ships on their journeys out into the world. If this moment were a scene from a film, let's say by Jim Jarmusch, then it would be quite possible that the two new songs from the Dad Horse Experience would start right now, and the camera would pull in to reveal the open Wadden Sea in all its grey, bittersweet beauty.

These two songs, presented to us in the summer of 2022 by Dad Horse Ottn, the band's eponymous mastermind and creative all-around genius, are remarkable not only because they're released on vinyl in the wonderful and far too rarely used 10-inch format. They're especially so because they open up a world we'd love to immerse ourselves in for much longer than just two six-minute tracks. And because for Ottn himself, it's also a departure to new shores, a farewell to the wonderfully offbeat world of basement gospel he once created.

This world has its roots in the old-time gospel of the Carter Family, Washington Phillips, and Arizona Dranes, and in the mothers and fathers of bluegrass: in Lester Flatt, Bill Monroe, and Earl Scruggs, those rough-and-tumble warriors who, with their weather-beaten guitars, fiddles, mandolins, and banjos, brought the Great American Songbook to their countrymen. Of course, almost no one knows them anymore, because we're lucky if even a few people still know who Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie were. But they all, that's for sure, would have loved him, this strange Dad Horse Ottn from the even stranger Bremen, just as he had always loved them, and yet only at the age of 39 found the courage to follow this love, to leave his previous life behind and travel the world with a tenor banjo, bringing her his very own, surreal version of gospel. And just like his idols, Ottn's songs dealt with failure, sin, abysses, worries and doubts, and, of course, death. The fact that this, paradoxical as it may sound, can also be a lot of fun despite all the darkness has been at the heart of the Dad Horse Experience from the very beginning. Dad Horse Ottn has always played with the wonderful ambiguity and snottiness of roots music, which, God knows, has more to do with the punk attitude than with the common understanding of church singing.

It starts with the fact that Ottn has always sung his way: intuitively, freely, sometimes off-kilter and broken, but always authentic and unvarnished. Ultimately, it's not the graceful performance that matters, but the message of the songs. And it's always been their very own quality that has earned Dad Horse Ottn an ever-growing audience around the world over the past few years, turning his basement gospel into a trademark in its own right.

With the two new songs "Nacht wie ein Messer" and "Cuxhaven," he now leaves this safe haven—accompanied by his wonderfully tasteful band—and sets out for the new shores mentioned at the beginning, opening a window deep into the abyss. Taken to such a place, only truly great artists can touch their listeners, and it is a testament to Dad Horse Ottn's artistry that he succeeds in this further development, this process of maturation. The language is now more direct—Ottn no longer sings in English, but in his native German—but the themes are more abstract, emotional, and introspective. It's still about enduring life's trials and the hardships of existence. But these are no longer the hardships of the outside world, but the demands of the inner world, the inadequacies of one's own character, the fears, the sadness, one's own stupidity. In "Night Like a Knife" it is above all the confrontation with dying, it is about the zone between life and death, in which the deceased only very slowly becomes aware that they have died. It is, so to speak, a post-mortem state of mind that Kurt Weill would probably have enjoyed as much as Sven Regener. In "Cuxhaven" it is the blend of melancholy and absurd comedy that immediately gives one this inexplicable desire for fish sandwiches in the dreariness of a port city that has been built into characterless thanks to post-war functional architecture. Perhaps Stuart Staples and his Tindersticks make exactly this kind of music when the night is at its darkest and the red wine is gone and they want to sway around the houses together.

Like the Dad Horse Experience, they are all concerned with carrying on the flame, with telling darkly beautiful ballads from the world of the odd and broken, the weird and absurd. It is about dignity in decline, which allows one to grin nonchalantly in the face of one's own drama. To some listeners this may seem out of date, but it is the exact opposite. It is beauty that only reveals itself at second or third glance. It is what Bob Dylan once so aptly called "healing music". And such things never become out of date; they have always been timeless, and perhaps we need precisely this kind of music now more than ever.