the iron lung quintet - For The Birds, All For The Birds (CD)
Every few years, autumn feels different than usual. Sunnier, warmer, and more friendly. The sky clears, the horizon is wide, and the migratory birds—they're not fleeing, they're traveling. Every few years, an album by the Iron Lung Quintet is released.
This band is a phenomenon. For more than 20 years, the five Hamburg natives have defied the breathless, hectic insignificance of the music world. With their lovingly arranged albums, they have created a unique sonic cosmos that offers a wide range of genres. If you like, you'll find elements of folk, indie pop, swing, surf, shoegazer, ambient, post-rock, and jazz. But ultimately, it's simply timelessly beautiful music, with an atmospheric density that's unparalleled.
On their new album, for the birds, all for the birds, which will of course be released in the autumn, comfort and hope are the dominant themes. Equipped with laconic wit, the iron lung quintet conjures up the comforting power of music and in doing so creates lyrics for eternity. "Death takes you places where irony won't go" is the opening line of the song "the theory of everything", a country-esque swan song to the existence of a universal formula. And when the tender, shimmering guitar kicks in in the chorus, it becomes immediately clear what the quintet means when they sing: "at the end of the day/ you need a tune that will comfort you/everything else remains a scheme/some draft, some dry/theory".
The guitars in general. They float, tremble, revel, and beguile at every turn, with a stylistic range that stretches from a crashing wall of sound à la Sonic Youth to dreamy dream pop (Ride, My Bloody Valentine) to country and Americana acoustics (Calexico, Matt Berninger).
Anyone who dismisses the Iron Lung Quintet as a guitar band is mistaken. On For the Birds, All for the Birds, the Hamburg-based band remains true to their reputation as an indie orchestra, incorporating opulent string and wind sections, percussion and electronics, pianos, synthesizers, and God knows what else into their elaborate arrangements. And time and again, the album surprises with magnificent trombones that make your heart sing, as in the insane adaptation of the composition "Butterfly" by Ukrainian-Canadian pianist Lubomyr Melnyk. Originally a purely instrumental piano piece, in the hands of the Iron Lung Quintet it becomes a sophisticated, almost jazzy hymn to the lightness of summer ("great summer lightness").
All of this blends beautifully into a soundscape, in which mixing engineer Tobias Levin (who has already mixed albums by Tocotronic, Ja Panik, Messer, Nils Koppruch, and Gisbert zu Knyphausen, among others) plays a significant role. The album's dense atmosphere often has something of a film score about it. And one involuntarily wishes there were films that captured the musical storytelling of the five Hamburg bands and continued it. These films would be beautiful, warm, and comforting.
01 All The While
02 Flip, The Bird
03 The Taste of Blood
04 Heavy Weight
05 The Sea Waits Patiently
06 Why Do Dogs Look At You Like That
07 Paper, Scissors, Stone
08 Theory of Everything
09 Panorama Inn
10 Sky Remains The Same
11 Great Summer Lightness
12 Oh, Gravity