With »Blank« BONGEN'S present their fourth album. The band from Cologne, Olpe and Wuppertal makes German-language music somewhere between singer-songwriter pop and indie rock. Normally, the group around the brothers Mario (vocals, guitar, keys) and Oliver Bongen (guitar) is four in the classic band formation - with Theo Weber on drums and Jens Grebe on bass - but recently also more and more often as an unplugged Duo. The new album takes the latter into account. The instrumentation is largely reduced to acoustic guitar and piano.
"Back then over the quarry" consists exclusively of voice and piano. The fact that some of the songs came across as “unfinished” was entirely intentional. They should look sketchy. Rough. Naked. "Blank" just.
After the multi-layered arrangement of the previous album »Fragebuch«, the question this time was: what can we leave out?
A minimalism that reveals the core of the music: straightforward, earthy, at times rough storytelling. The stories tell of failure in everyday life. Surviving in the consumer society. Of renewal and forgetting. And the bright side of the apocalypse. There are memories of a village youth, a (fictitious) family history spanning decades and finally the comforting view of a chaise longue in a retirement home.
All pieces are united by the subtle look into human abysses, only to discover a spark of hope somewhere. Roughly in lines like this; "One light still burns in the graveyard of opportunities". Or: "Heaven is a spot in the chest somewhere"
»Blank« is distributed by Timezone Records as CD, download and stream and is available on iTunes, Amazon, JPC and many other online shops.
1. New snow
2. Piece of paper
3. A storm is brewing
4. Hospital Clown
5. Back then over the quarry
6. The ghost of Alois Bongen
7. Against Nothing
8. Dirty tones
9. Better than death
10. When I come to
11. Thanks for the crumbs
12. Chaise longue
