Once you hear his voice, you'll never forget it: warm and raspy, political and laconic. Karl Neukauf is a songwriter from Berlin, someone who once drank in the basement bars he sings about. "Behind Geraniums and Curtains" is the title of his fourth album, an album full of strange and touching stories, collected during the long nights of the capital and on the outskirts of Germany. It tells of love and missing someone, of leaving and coming home, of old friends and old ladies, of guys hanging out at the bar, somewhere between Bottrop and Hoyerswerda, between Hamburg and Idar-Oberstein.
"Behind Geraniums and Curtains" is a journey through Germany in 2018, recorded in Berlin and Poland, in East Germany and the Ruhr region. Karl Neukauf's voice is catchy, and he plays almost everything you hear on the record himself: bass and electric guitar, grand piano and Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes, harmonium and Mellotron, even a shenai, an Indian oboe. And every time you think it might get a bit too cozy, a bit too chanson-like, he expands the range of instruments, plays on glass bottles, barbecue grills, and metal buckets – and hurls lines at you that sound like this: Do it yourself and build yourself a coffin. Paint it, put something in it that you might need later. Karl Neukauf is from Berlin. Not from the Berlin of hipsters and vegans, but from the Berlin of smokers and poets.
He makes music for adults. Music that tastes like black coffee, not milk foam.
01 Let's go to the Elbe
02 False Enemy #2
03 Tell me where are you
04 Silence of the Night
05 Far far away
06 In this city
07 Coffin never never
08 Only cups outside
09 Mercy Shot Option
10 hotel rooms 304
11 In the Arms of Morpheus
