German Error Message. I like a good band or artist name. The obscurer, and more literary the better. The Velvet Underground The Doors, Steely Dan, Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, Mission of Burma, Josef K. Bands who would look as good on your bookshelf as on your record player.
So German Error Message immediately attracted my interest when I came across it yesterday. It's a name that sounds as if it might have gone through Google Translate. Deutsche Fehlermeldung.
Even better when a bit of rudimentary research told me that they're not even German and so perhaps aren't mistaken either. They're a gateway for expression for Paul Kintzing, an engineer and producer from Nashville, Tennessee. Tor Zum Ausdruck. Ok I'll stop...
The record itself more than lived up to expectations. Their latest eponymous album (not their first), sets off with one of the best opening songs I've heard on any record this year but also gives no end of reasons to keep listening for anyone looking for the kind of slightly morose and certainly oblique outsider excellence celebrated on blogs like It Starts.
The record proceeds to plant itself firmly in the tradition of great American mumbling, downcast introvert artists of the last thirty years. Elliott Smith, East River Pipe, Red House Painters, Marmoset, Grandaddy, Bonnie Prince, Bill Callahan and so forth. The Outsider Tribe. The quiet, interesting kid in every classroom. The one that fascinates the engaged teacher. The one plotting escape.
We get one muffled song after another all starting in the middle of nowhere and mumbling their way to undefined finishing posts without exactly uprooting any trees along the way. Songs from artists like these don't intend to uproot any trees. That would disturb the peace and who in their right mind would want to do that.
Instead this builds its game quietly and cleverly sets up a set of pretty passing triangles in the opponents final third and grafts its way to a quiet but impressive away victory to pull itself clear of the relegation strugglers. My kind of record.
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