Austria’s favorite monastery high school students kept their fans waiting for a new record for more than three years. First things first: Yes, it was worth it! Bilderbuch are back and on “Gelb ist das Feld” they clearly have fun behaving like a real rock band again. The sound is less spherical, meandering and introspective than on the previous albums “mea culpa” and “Vernissage My Heart”, but much more edgy and demanding. It’s been a long time since coolness, linguistic wit peppered with Anglicisms and positive exuberance nestled together as naturally as on the 14 songs of the seventh album by the Kremsmünster quartet.
Love as an emotional engine
For the first time, love is the emotional motor that drives a picture book album. In “Dates,” a snappy and charming love song with a perfectly formed chorus, Maurice Ernst adores a “sweet girl” who “lives down the street.” With success, because in the following “Nahuel Huapi” there’s intercourse in the great outdoors – and a banging guitar solo by Michael Krammer. Also “Schwarzes Karma” – a flowing, wonderfully catchy pop song with a delicate 80s flair -, “Klima” and the casual “Baby, that you know it” negotiate relationship boxes in a typical picture book way. “I get so hot when you’re over me / I get so cold without you” is loudly proclaimed, sexy “when I die, then of love overdose” whispered, with the all-important question at the end “was it love or sweet codependency?” enthroned. When love is over, “everything blurs like reflections in a faucet,” as the wonderful “I’m Not Gonna Lie” puts it. Never before has Maurice cultivated his artificial language, which alternates between dialect, English and pop culture quotations, with such pleasure as on “Yellow is the field”. Reminiscent of Liverpool new wave greats Echo & The Bunnymen, “Between Your World and My World” and the title track are also exquisite.
If Bilderbuch had had the courage to remove a few weaker songs – “La Pampa”, “Ab und auf”, “Bergauf”, “Daydrinking” – from the already 58-minute record, “Gelb ist das Feld” would have been a masterpiece and not “only” become a very good album.
Source: Nachrichten
