Balloon Pilot

Anyone can warm up for blankets. Blankets keep the body and soul warm. This is what “Blankets”, the title of Balloon Pilot’s third album, stands for: music that calms, comforts the listener, makes it feel like it’s in the right place at the right time. Matze Brustmann, the fulcrum of this circle of friends who have become a band, also likes to cuddle into the music. Not a day when he doesn’t pick up the guitar on his couch or sing on long car trips. He likes to drift away, mostly towards his melodies.

But he also feels that in the long run not every inner frozenness can be covered. That ceiling upon ceiling upon ceiling cramps, crushes and holds what wants to flow, rise and detach itself. Then the songwriter becomes the Ent-Decker. As in the touching single from which he extracted the album title: “Blankets Over Blankets”. The singer takes off the soul patches that prevent the blood from flowing: “Blankets over blankets wrapping the heart to keep it warm, but I’m wondering will it ever be unwrapped from the bandage stopping the blood from rushing”.

Sometimes Balloon Pilot’s pieces are an electric blanket, sometimes they are the heart pressure massage. In any case, the listener immediately feels that someone is taking care of him. This is also due to how well the rescue team is attuned to each other. The friends have been playing together since school, in various bands and orchestras indiepop, punk, reggae, rock and jazz.

Even if they have long since lived widely scattered and made some careers such as Andi Haberl as one of the most sought-after drummers in the country (The Notwist, Johannes Enders, Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, Klaus Doldinger), they reconnect with Balloon Pilot to form a quiet, colorful giant in German pop heaven. “Easy to enjoy,” says Mehmet Scholl, football and pop expert and head of the label Millaphon, proud of his “guys from Munich”.

The helmsman on board is Matze Brustmann. He sings, plays electric and acoustic guitar, Mellotron and Wurtlitzer piano. For concentrated production, he has retreated to an old forge in the Bavarian Forest. Helped him for the first time on the controls, on the keyboard and with the violin Nico Sierig, half of the avant-garde duo Joasinho and sound magician of the neo-folk band Angela Aux.

Just like the new first bassist Jacob Ford (Me and Marie, Claudia Koreck, Jacob Bruckner), he is an enrichment for the collective around the proven forces Benni Schäfer (bass), Andi Haberl (drums, glockenspiel, drummachine), Tobias Koark-Haberl (keyboard) and Christian Radojewski (guitar). Just at

Concerts are like a reunion with old friends: inspiring and disturbing, yet familiar and reassuring. New names come into play at “Blankets”. Matthias Brustmann has worked his way under Elliott Smith’s favourite blanket to find new inspiration for other artists he likes. He has stretched one arm over to Tom Waits’ cute snouts, the other to the genius of Peter Gabriel, one hand to the gloom of Feist, the other to young folk stars such as Andy Shauf, Mac DeMarco and Grizzly Bear. And yet all ten pieces are all Matthias Brustmann, his life, his passion.

He shares his tender love for the young family and the one-year-old daughter (“You’ll Be A Part Of Mine”) as well as a horror at the rampant populism: In “Light Headed”, Brustmann is outraged by the crude cry of hotheads in politics and the media, and even keeps the fine tone. His source of inspiration is also his second life as a world-class kayaker who plunges into house-high abysses.

In “What Happend” old shock pictures of the death of his cousin appear many years ago: the gorge, into which they paddled with joy, and the end when he could not help the drowned: “And then you went down / just sunk in and drowned / and I couldn’t lift you off the ground / just like a stone.” The feeling that lasts longer, that drives him, that keeps him awake at night, in a pleasant way, a spiritual moment somewhere out there.

The inside is the music. For them, in “Midnight Blue” stands a cottage somewhere out there, in which the old pipes whistle in front of them and the young family sings to it. Here it is cozy, precisely because the paint peels off, the mice gnaw at the wallpaper, you can see the stars through a hole in the roof and the wind whistles through the cracks. Well, a thick blanket can't hurt.