GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU – wer hat von meiner installation gegessen?

(CD, 22. Jahrhundert)

Just when I was wondering what Fredl Engelmayr and Bulbul were up to at the moment, because I realized that I hadn’t heard from them in quite a while and I found an old Bulbul-tape that I promised to review but never got around to, I switch through the channels and happen onto the final minutes of a session or concert show of Good Enough for You. And before I am able to take a breath or two and start to research, I receive two (!) CDs to keep me updated. What a wonderful day. Good work. One is the great Fugu & The Cosmic Mumu reviewed seperately, the other one is Raumschiff Engelmayr’s collaboration with Karin Brüll under the name of Good Enough For You. And it is.

Brüll and Engelmayr behave like the Francoise Cactus and Brezel Göring of Noise Rock, infusing the expanding and half improvised song structures of Bulbul with a big dose of almost Sixtes Beat, hipshaking, homerecording and humour. Not that Engelmayr or Bulbul never displayed any kind of fun, quite on the contrary, but on “wer hat von meiner installation gegessen?” this aspect is shoved to the foreground so heavily, it is the first thing you’ll probably notice. The title itself should suffice. Or when was the last time you read a songtitle like “Sitting on the dog of my babe”? And that song also features a cool, rolling, thundering bass line. I like bass sounds, I think I mentioned that from time to time.

The next thing is the amount of home-recorded electronic experimentalism that went into these songs. The percussive basis of some songs seems to come directly from a programmed software (e.g. “Beam me onto you”) strengthened by added layers of guitar, voices, horns and whatever comes in handy. At some points friends like DD Kern and derhunt join in (to get this project as close to Bulbul as is possible). After the second song the latest you’ll know that basically anything is possible on this record, no matter how weird or far out it seems. Vocoding? All right. Harsh distorted guitar? Sure. Counting off the time as a bridge to a song? Why not. This kind of arranging songs should be called mashing rather than mixing.

The next and no less important thing is the higher amount of melodies, finding its peak in the excessive use of background vocals that go “aaahhhh” or even “la la la” in harmony to the main melody. On “Lemmy Lemme know” they not only add a handful of alternative rock allusions from the last decade or longer, they also steal a melody and the harmony singing from Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. Melodies are everywhere, within the nonsense(?) lyrics as within the weird experiments. Is is fair to call the double dose of melodies on this record a female influence? Well, thank you Karin Brüll.

After I said all this, please don’t mistake this record for a project to rip off on old and new trends or a fun-thing (and definitely don’t judge it as a fun-project!), things ain’t never that easy with Engelmayr and nothing, believe me, nothing at all is ever just a joke. It might be a big joke, but there is always another level, like some musical genius idea or a shitkicking of genre expectations. He has been walking the grey, undefineable middlegrounds for a decade now, has released everything from an hour of feedback to recorded noises of a bicycle, from rehearsal room excerpts of unfinished songs to painstakingly structured and arranged noise epics. Usually, what is left for me to do is to listen, enjoy and then try to describe what is happening. If you think you have found a system, please drop me a line. But don’t tell me Engelmayr told you himself, because he’ll just say he just does what comes naturally. Believe what you like. If it works out for you, then it is probably okay.

A little weirdness is always good. For you. So try to lose that straitjacket binding you to your straight life, to your car and owned flat, your pension plan and family focus, let some weirdness into your life. Me, I will spend a few more days (taken all together) trying to decipher this baby, then move on to the next record. Life’s a bitch, but at least god or evolution gave us a sense of humour to be able to cope with it.