»Big Love« by Nichtseattle | Absolutely happy

Never solo again: “Große Liebe” sounds like a band’s album. Photo: Sascha Schlegel Katharina Kollmann sings lines in the songs of her band Nichtseattle that sometimes sound like answers to all the questions that no one actually asks in German-speaking indie music. What it's like growing older, what you wish you had told your dead father, why you feel so incomplete.

Although “answer” is worded too narrowly. Let's take the last point: Why the managed world suggests that you are not fast, not productive, not sexy, not in a good mood, not thin, not successful enough. And therefore perhaps justifiably lonely or poor or precarious.

The album of the week. Further texts at dasnd.de/ Plattenbau

On her album "Haus" Kollmann sang one of the many associative and at the same time dense descriptions of this point: "Too many people are pictures now, they look shiny / Their apartments are in an old house / And if you ask them / Have they just been lucky / I find them mainly hardworking / And yet / here too / it's not enough."

Not an answer, but rather citing your own perceptions and experiences, from which very precise descriptions of the situation can be formulated. Often based on details - cake crumbs on the table, the quinoa order on the first date - which describe a whole type of man.

On the new album “Große Liebe” Kollmann has further refined the musical and lyrical techniques. Or better yet, non-Seattle have refined the procedures. The path taken on “Haus” continues, not as a solo artist, but with several artists, in collaboration.

“Große Liebe” sounds like a band’s album. It is unmistakable, for example, in the love song "Me with Glasses", in which a choir sings about a state in which you are completely present with the other person and therefore, as a person in love, and yet are always torn in different ways, making it noticeable as something general: "I think about you all damn day / in a book / in a song / in a like / in a feed / in a choir / a neighborhood room / in a park / or behind a tree / on one Crossroads / in a city / that has no time for chance«.

Just like throughout the entire album, which is not called “Große Liebe” for nothing, this great promise is sung again and again with, superficially heard, simple images. But they're not that simple, but rather, when it comes to love (but actually with everything else too), they always think about the whole world. And then always come back to a sentence that seems banal, but which is a huge compliment after a few thousand years of patriarchy and heteronormative sexuality: "Guys are annoying, but you're not / I think about you all damn day."

The music is more compact and hardly fragmentary as on the first two non-Seattle albums “Wendekid” and “Kommunistenlibido”. Melancholic, anthemic brass, slowcore, really beautiful guitar melodies. In general, it should become clear that Kollmann is not only a gifted author of lyrics, but also a gifted guitarist. Probably, in addition to the gender bias nonsense that is still unfortunately common, it is also not obvious because the texts are really singular. There isn't a single phrase on "Große Liebe" either.

Despite all the heavy themes, there is never anything heavy about this music. “My Ladies,” one of the many love songs on the album, celebrates the women of a house project in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania that Kollmann is a part of: “My ladies always find a way / even if that just consists of / giving up, telling each other about it / and then just going for a swim.” Love can be many things: friendship, solidarity and also romantic love.

“Nobody wants to be alone,” was the motto on the debut “Wendekid” in 2019. A sentence from which everything that makes Non-Seattle's music so touching can be derived: the band sound, the singing about love in all its forms, the feminist knowledge, the criticism of capitalism. A longing that is fulfilled again and again in the music of non-Seattle: “I want a few more years like this, please.” It's very good to listen to this album.

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