Frankly, Bitte Leben review:

Frankly, Bitte Leben album review by Anna Ida Cortese

“You don't enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Listening BITTE LEBEN I had the feeling of not entering a record, but a question that continually changes shape: how do you stay inside the change?

BITTE LEBEN don't try to solve it. He crosses it. And it does so by building a series of answers that are never definitive, but take shape in places, in bodies, in relationships.

The first thing that remains is melancholy. Not in atmosphere, but in posture. It is that condition that allows you to stay inside things as they change, without forcing them into a stable form. Here melancholy does not close, it keeps open.

It forces you to stay, not to simplify, not to run away too soon.

From Zagara to BITTE LEBEN: When places start to respond

Zagara it was already a threshold. A point where love and fear were together without finding a synthesis.

In BITTE LEBEN that tension expands and becomes a structure.
And above all something changes: places enter. Not like wallpapers. Like answers.

The house, the square, the street. Turin, Berlin, Milan, Palermo. Each space becomes a different way of being inside the change. The house holds back and asks for distance. The square exhibits and connects. The road forces movement.

It's not real geography. It is a geography that is deposited within, made up of physical and metaphysical places that answer, each in its own way, to the same question.

This record is a slide. It has the flavor of the ancient but decidedly contemporary colors.

It shows you something, but not everything. And as you watch it, that image changes.

but you (intro) opens the dialogue. There is no distance: two people enter immediately. The first answer is already a relationship.

5 in the morning it is an answer that comes from the periphery. A place where growing up means remaining in the balance between resignation and the desire to leave. Cathedral try to build a space. Being home for someone, without ceasing to be open. A fragile but necessary response.

Sirens on the Moon is the answer of the summer. The one that seems light, but carries underneath a restlessness that never completely dissolves. Bossa naked accept the transformation of relationships. It doesn't close, it doesn't cancel. Let things change shape.

My Grandparents' House is one of the clearest answers. The house does not only protect: it forces you to choose how to be with your loved ones. And sometimes it also means walking away. Telephone Tango It's Berlin. An answer that comes from disorientation, from not yet having a definition. And that's where it makes sense.

Zagara remains suspended. He doesn't decide between ecstasy and fear. It holds both, and perhaps this is precisely its strength. I don't care anymore it's a tear. An answer that breaks, without worrying about being clean. If I could it's the point where the disc becomes most vulnerable. A response that tries to protect, despite knowing that it can't really do so. And that's where it hits.

PLEASE LIVE (outro) doesn't close the conversation. He puts the chaos back together and lets it breathe. The final answer is not a solution: it is accepting that change does not stop.

This instability can also be heard in music.
BITTE LEBEN he moves between songwriting and electronics without ever transforming this combination into a recognizable or reassuring formula.

The production, built together with Goedi (Diego Montinaro), works by subtraction and accumulation at the same time: the songs seem light at first listening, almost immediate, but inside they continually stratify.
Electronic carpets, more organic openings, details that enter and disappear without ever really weighing down the sound.

This is precisely one of the most successful things on the album: the ability to keep two opposing tensions together. On the one hand, lightness, the one that allows you to go through the songs effortlessly. On the other, a more complex construction, made up of small sound shifts, of contaminations ranging from cold wave to a more intimate pop, up to almost dance-like moments.

There is never the feeling of an exercise in style. The experimentation is not shown off, but remains functional to the movement of the record. It serves to make it breathe, to make it change direction, to prevent it from stopping in one form.

And so that question comes back here too: how do we stay within the change? The answer, musically, is precisely this controlled instability. An equilibrium that never fully stabilizes, but which precisely for this reason continues to move.

In a world that burns, BITTE LEBEN he doesn't try to save you. It leaves you inside the movement. It forces you to stay there, where things are not yet defined.

And perhaps this is precisely the most successful point of the album: not telling you how to live but showing you that living means staying within the change, even when you don't yet know what form it will take.

To listen to while travelling.
Car, window down.
When the landscape changes and, without realizing it, something inside also changes.

Better songs: Zagara, Cathedral, My Grandparents' House, Telephone Tango, If I could

Vote: Half past eight ✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰☆

Full tracklist:

1. but you (intro)
2. 5 in the morning
3. Cathedral
4. Sirens on the Moon
5. Bossa naked
6. My Grandparents' House
7. Telephone Tango
8. Zagara
9. I don't care anymore
10. If I could
11. PLEASE LIVE (outro)

Cover artwork credits: graphics by Alberto Ricchi And Rosa Artale, photo by Cosimo Buccolieri.