Album by Jens Friebe: Repetition with anxiety potential

Jens Friebe has always worked on the margins and from there brought enchanting pop into the world. Which also sounded quite pleasantly un-German because there are a lot of flashes in the Berlin artist's songs, playful and inauthentic. Friebe's music is also unwaveringly stubborn, twisted, surprising and decidedly artificial. And in pop you sometimes get into more interesting situations through artificiality than through suggestions of authenticity.

Find or invent something new, become someone else, but even that only temporarily. Every Jens Friebe album sounds and looks different: it seems as if repetition, saturation and stagnation have anxiety potential.

New music from the 50-year-old always means establishing connections to pop history and texts that have already been written. There are also a lot of quotes in his songs. For example, Friebe covered “First we take Manhattan” on the last album under his own name, in a direct translation by Leonard Cohen: “I don’t think much of your fashion business, mister / The drugs you take make you thin / I don’t like what’s happening to my sister / First we take Manhattan / then we take Berlin.”

Friberty: “Friberty I” (State Act/Bertus/Zebralution); live November 13th “Urban Spree” Berlin, November 18th “Night asylum” Hamburg will continue in 2027

The album was called “We are beautiful”, released in 2022, and then hardly anything was heard for four years. A live soundtrack of the dark romantic film “Nekromantik 2”, appearances here and there. Now Jens Friebe has transformed again, or liberated, as his Austrian colleague Andreas Spechtl calls it in the press release for the album: “Friberty, freedom plus Friebe, the seam is still clearly visible.”

You can't find out what it is from the music. From the German language perhaps, now comprehensively. From your own name. And the format “A band is on stage and someone is singing in the front”.

The artist essentially recorded “Friberty I” with two synthesizers and a drum machine. The result sounds surprisingly brittle and yet is immediately accessible. The melodies that defined Jens Friebe's music are still there, but now they are often slightly different.

At this point you could cite a handful of pop-historical references to clarify this. But perhaps it would be better to take another look at the previous work; With the “sounds like” everything is always standardized like that. Friebe used to have sound details and funny noises that sounded as if they were pure, beautiful ends in themselves.

You can hear “At the end of all celebrations” from the already mentioned “We are beautiful”. And also thematically: beauty and effort are things that are important again on the new album. When a verse from the Velvet Underground classic song “Venus in Furs” is sung in the English-language Puhdys cover “Go to Her,” a lot of things come together.

Also present again: love songs that are about and want to tell stories about more than two people. For example, when Friberty lists who he would kill for: not for the EU or for free trade, not for 72 virgins, but “for you”.

Everything that happens here between people always happens in a world full of other people, all subjects, capital, art, universes of meaning in which one inevitably always moves and which are also negotiated. Walter Benjamin is also quoted. Nobody is an island: “People say, you’re born alone / But I could swear there was someone to catch my fall.”

But the album is not as text-heavy as it might sound here. “Friberty I” is above all a sound album. It squeaks and crackles and shines, the sounds are pretty, but never homely, because they're usually somehow strange. In any case, there is a lot to discover musically here, especially a lot of noises.

And guitar solos played with keyboards can suddenly be tolerated. Monochrome confetti rain, so dense that everything repressive and constricting is drowned in the tiles. Inevitably temporary, because it's pop and not a revolution. But still.