The Prongs – Truant
Your favourite band, if you’re lucky, probably disbanded after making one or two albums. If you’re really, really lucky, death and inner squabbles stopped them from touring their biggest hit for the next decades, to ever dwindling ticket sales.
It’s nobody’s fault, of course, but the economics of being in a rock n’ roll band never work out. Everybody dumb enough to feed this machine does it at their own risk, but still, there’s something that bugs me.
There’s just not enough of this beautiful music. Certainly, the deaths, lawsuits and inner-squabbling aren’t helping. Neither is the fact that the few artists and bands that could still make great music are busy doing podcasts from their mansions.
We’re spoiled to still have bands like The Prongs, whose poetry-post-punk heard on the single “Truant” matches up to most of the greats in this genre. What’s the point? Adding a bit more beauty and a few more stories to an art form that delivered plenty of thrills, but not for too long. The Prongs sound and look like the kind of people who could be doing plenty of other things. What luck that they’ve settled on making music instead!
OMSK – Nackt
Becoming a resident of Berlin willingly is very much like joining a medical experiment where they try out experimental medicine on you for years, jot down the findings and give you a fistful of bills at the end.
It’s something that people do for a couple of reasons. The naive ones simply think that they’re joining the greatest party on planet Earth. And while that might well be true, this isn’t the kind of party to keep you smiling the whole way through.
Others, like the members of OSMK, just need a place where the best and the worst in people can come out over the pummeling noise of electronic beats. They are people happy with the experiment and eager to make their own discoveries on the side.
OSMK’s “Nackt” is tense and danceable, much like Berlin itself. It’s the kind of music meant to encourage you to make new friends that could easily turn into bitter enemies. It’s about the best and worst in human nature, a clash that for nearly a century has been best observed in the German capital. OSMK’s musicians are simply delivering their findings.
