Phantom Songs

Ten albums and over 1,500 gigs later, the Berliners are still all over the map. When the Iron Curtain was pulled back in the last moments of the 1980s, the world got a little smaller. When, within a few years, a bunch of Berliners corralled themselves together to form 17 Hippies, the planet shrank a little further. Just as the boundaries of Eastern Europe were getting relocated, this collective drafted a musical map that dispensed with previously observed borderlines. Everything went into the pot: a simmering stew of Balkan brass, Weimar cabaret, Parisian chanson, folk and jazz, flavoured by trilingual vocals. And yet, somehow, it all sounded like it was meant to be played by the same band.

The years have diminished neither the band's curiosity nor their one-world view, although Phantom Songs, their tenth album, favours understatement over boisterousness. The title is apposite. Much of this record's contents are ephemeral, ghostly whispers of songs: ‘Ton Étrangère’ features a haunted female narration, while ‘Across Waters’ is a splinter of icy folk that wouldn't be out of place on the records of Bon Iver or early Iron & Wine. That said, these dozen or so musicians (ignore their numerically incorrect name) are still capable of letting fly when needed – no more so than on the twinging, swinging ‘Singapore’. And when they treat Captain Beefheart's ‘Give Me Dat Harp Boy’ to a Middle European tour of duty, it's clear they retain the same disregard for artificial borders and boundaries as when they started out. Long may they not change their thinking.