Bergen

You can call Bergen's music folkpop, you can say, so the band, but also Schlager. bergen is now something of a rattle four-man scaffold, which rehearses in the evening quite respectably in a cellar room in the east of Dresden. The corridors smell a bit like urine and beer and right above it angry beauticians hammer on the heating pipe if they take a bit too much momentum.

The band’s songs – most of which are given the finishing touches by Erdmöbel producer ekimas – deal with the seemingly endless process of growing up, with fragile constructs such as a shared home, relationships and the nuclear family, all of which collapse like a house of cards in ‘Klötze’.

Elsewhere, one is startled by one’s own composure, by the casual observation of the tedium of one’s own life, as when the narrator reflects on himself in ‘Zeiten für Kerle’: ‘I have my hands resting almost leisurely on my stomach and am listening to stories that require prior knowledge.’ Her latest publication, ‘Zeiten für Kerle’, is more human and less animal, more painful realism and less eccentricity than has previously been the norm with bergen.