Since arriving in Berlin six years ago to a revolving circus of hepcats, drugs, and trendy hangouts, Odd Couple duo Tammo Dehn and Jascha Kreft, (two kindergarten pals from Ostfriesland), still feel out of place. Perhaps it’s typified in their name – an assertion of strange outsiderness, but together the duo weave a kind of art that dredges up the nuggets of rock’s dinosaur past and infuses it with a thoroughgoing modern approach to recording sound. When the duo started working on their debut It’s A Pressure To Meet You, released two years ago, their style was still very much in its embryonic stages. Now for second album Flügge (meaning “independent” or “to spread one’s wings” in German), the band feel like they’re taking another shot at the start. Shearing their sultry garage-rock archaisms in favour of a grander, looser, style that takes influence from hip hop and the kosmische musik experimentation of West Germany in the seventies, Flügge is a different beast entirely, and one which Germany, and the wider world, hasn’t heard the likes of yet.
A mouthpiece for millennial disaffection, Odd Couple’s new album brims with introspection and self-discovery. It’s a clever dissection of the things making our generation unhappy, and a nod towards the possible solutions in store. Mostly though, it’s a profoundly hard-hitting and deftly-delivered sonic assault that paves the way for a new rock renaissance. Odd Couple are everyman and everywoman, living in these dangerous times with the fear of uncertainty, but hell bent on spreading their wings and soaring high.
Odd Couple: Am I Evil
Free from the artificial processing that most rock go through nowadays, and possessed by an attitude many thought was fading from music like a dream in the light of morning, ‘Am I Evil’ is a septic jaunt back to a time when things weren’t so mercilessly sanitised and lobotomised. Dinosaur riffs abound, the likes of which maestros like Jimmy Page or Jack White have dedicated their lives to searching out, and Odd Couple use them to question their unhealthiest and most intrusive thoughts.
Odd Couple: Am I Evil Lyrics:
