Charlotte Brandi - AN DEN ALPTRAUM (2023) Hi-Res

Two years after the EP "AN DAS ANGSTLAND" ('To The Angstland') Berlin-based artist Charlotte Brandi releases her second studio album "AN DEN ALPTRAUM" ('To the Nightmare') and with it not only her first long player in German, but also a work produced with FLINTA*-only participation. It is about men, women, fear, money, death and the contribution to the revolution. This record, at least, is one.

The decision to realize the album only with female or female read was one against convenience and for the overdue paradigm shift in the music world. "Cultural recasting is not born out of comfort and to my knowledge there is not yet an all-female produced album on the German market. And if I were 14 today, it would teach me that it can be done," says Charlotte Brandi. Behind this idealism is also an artist who is no longer up for power struggles in the studio with male colleagues. "For the first time, I didn't feel like a little girl during an album production," Brandi says of her fruits of consistent feminist process optimization.

Thematically, Brandi shaves the stubbly present and continues with the tone of her 2020 EP, becoming even more demanding, sharp and precise. In the hall of mirrors of self-designs, she recognizes and burns some of them, as in "DIE LETZTE BRUECKE" ('The Last Bridge'): "It's strange, but at night when everything's asleep / My head rests full of pent-up dreams / I haven't lived any of them yet." It's true: most of the time in life, we are in a state in which not everything is possible anymore, but still some things are - and yet the realization that we can no longer be and become everything always hurts a little. Charlotte Brandi simultaneously puts her fingers in this wound and blows on it.

Perhaps this album is also in some ways an attempt to arrive, despite the fact that so many innovations lie within. The themes reflect many of the discourses currently being held, without boasting universal answers. "I want to impose these themes on us," says Charlotte Brandi, releasing listeners into a unique sound world in which harmony and disharmony, accusation and conciliatory snuggling are often only a few bars apart. And that is perhaps Brandi's greatest strength: to bundle the simultaneity of all things into a unique and catchy fusion. The pain is made of glass, she sings around the fragility of the lyrics with her own playfulness. The hit "GELD" ('Money') could be taken for a good-humored anthem for driving around, if it didn't contain lines like: "Do you notice, the economy is collapsing back there/ But we'll keep driving/ Just get in the car with us/ Be our tour companion." So it's just a driving-around anthem with a scratchy throat that belongs there, rationally speaking.

The stylistic spectrum ranges from an a capella choir in the opener "DER EKEL" ('The Nausea') to yodel interpretations to classic American fingerpicking in "TODESANGST" ('Fear Of Death'), which skillfully catches the disturbing lyrics here: "Like a blood clot the fear lies behind my forehead/ You don't make the impression that nothing can happen to us". Brandi pulls out all the stops of art-pop like no other, proving once again that there is no one else in the local music scene with such versatility and unbridled curiosity as she does. On "AN DEN ALPTRAUM" her voice, which has always been impressive, also achieves new freedom and thus a wealth of facets. It flutters, scratches, crashes, recovers, shines at the very top or comes from a place very dark, very bottom like the deep sigh at the beginning of "FRAU" ('Woman'). These breaks and facets are fine and important, the album breathes and pulsates thanks to the decision to let these unpolishednesses have their space. The Brandi Sound is timeless and always in full control, but never slippery and bypasses all possibilities of pandering to the zeitgeist.

Again and again, Brandi's smug, self-ironic humor flashes through between the razor-sharp lines. The "loud person with a striking face," as she sings in "DER EKEL," uses it to fight her way through the thicket of a world full of homogenized individualism. And then finds comfort, hope and humanity again and again. "Don't hold back your forms any longer/ Spit out your worries/ And fly up to fortune", it says in "Frau". In general, the switch to German was a liberating blow, Brandi says. What was already noticeable in earlier solo works and in her first project Me and My Drummer unfolds here for the first time in all its grandeur: the ability to narrate from the largest to the smallest dimension and to grasp musically as well as lyrically what is otherwise difficult to grasp.

The tongue-in-cheek play on words in the title refers to the places of origin of individual songs on the edge of the Alps, but also to "Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum," ('Your Home Is Our Nightmare' issued by Fatma Aydemir & Hengameh Yaghoobifarah) a queerfeminist anthology that settles accounts with Germany and the concept of home. In many ways, "AN DEN ALPTRAUM" is a homeward journey. Or at least the beginning of it, the first steps on uncharted territory, full of elated uncertainty and rational optimism. And the manifesto of an extraordinary musician, who defies everything that is there to defy. Take heart, baby, and get on board.

The album musicians' names also speak for themselves, featuring The Mars Volta's new live drummer Philo Tsoungui or Shanice Ruby Bennett, bass player of Lianne La Havas' live band and having Stella Sommer as a guest vocalist on VOM VERLIEREN ('Of Losing').