Album "Konstrukt 5"

Buntspecht: Between comedy and tragedy

No time to lose: Buntspecht are releasing albums at a breakneck pace - and are enjoying a steadily growing audience.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Phat Penguin, Marlene Del Bello)

Over the last few years, Buntspecht have become Austria's most popular style rejects and have long been known and loved beyond the country's borders. On their new album "Konstrukt 5", the sextet once again pursues the abstract without forgetting catchiness. Lukas Klein and Roman Geßler give a closer look.

If you like to expect the unexpected musically, Buntspecht are the right choice. Like no other band, the Viennese combo has been able to mix indie pop, klezmer and gypsy sounds, folk, jazz borrowings and a lot of poetic soul into a sound mash for almost ten years, which has made constant change its intention. "Konstrukt 5" is the band's sixth album and they don't want to make things too easy for themselves or their listeners. After the brilliant predecessor "An das Gestern, das nie Morgen darfte werden. I'm waiting" (2023), the band wanted to take two steps back in the product description. "We argued a lot back then until we came up with the oversized name," recalls singer Lukas Klein, "it was almost a prose text. This time Florentin said something and nobody contradicted him. We all love odd numbers, we love prime numbers and numerology. It just worked out really well."

Locked up and written
Alongside Klein, trumpeter and melodica player Florentin Scheicher is something of a staple of Buntspecht. Whereas two years ago, the six-piece band had locked themselves away together to write songs, this time they spent a week in a hut in Reichenau an der Rax and just let the ideas flow. The most important premise was informality. "We decided that as soon as something got stuck or some kind of resistance arose somewhere, we wouldn't pursue the idea any further. It should come from a single source, quite naturally." The recorded demos were then taken to their colleagues in the studio in Burgenland, where they worked on the finished pieces together. Once again, Buntspecht found a new approach to creating songs and not slipping into routine. "It was never the plan to create an album. We just saw what happened and what came out of it. In the end we saw: The best things come out of calm and ease."

The journey to the twelve new song chapters began with the opener and the single "Im Fluss" and "Vom Kopf der Hut". In between, countless curiosities fit into Buntspecht's cabinet of curiosities, which is not short of verbal and sonic curiosities. Songs are called "Party im Schnitzelhaus" or "Sexy Fieber", they convey a casual cowboy feeling ("Verfolgungsjagd") or sing about the pain of loss ("Wenn du jetzt gehst"). Another new approach was that the lyrics had to follow the composition and not vice versa. For the two lyricists Klein and Scheicher, this meant having to put their creative freedom on hold because the (sometimes poetic) words had to follow the sound construct. "We have a lot of discussions, just like in the good old democracy," emphasizes saxophonist Roman Geßler, "which is both a curse and a blessing, but in the end the differences are never so big that they become insurmountable." Klein has to smile. "In art, dictatorship is sometimes a good thing. We have many specialists for different areas in the band. Sometimes there is a dictator, who is then overthrown and everything becomes democratic again."

Organic growth
Buntspecht exist and like to play according to the principle of upheaval. Breaking up structures, breaking up dogmas, breaking up songs - the main thing is not to do things by the book and repeat yourself. Even though "Unter den Masken" is still the most popular "signature song" among fans, repeating this successful formula would be out of the question. "Although I wouldn't push hype off the edge of the bed," Geßler is quick to add, "but on the whole it's good that the band has always grown slowly and organically. You can't control something like that from the outside anyway, but it feels healthy the way we've developed." Songs like "Im Fluss", "Way Down Alley" or "Die Stadt" are particularly topical in terms of content. The political situation in the world and the problems of the present are not lost on Buntspecht. "I think we've always written very contemporary songs, but we used to be even more naïve," Klein sums it up, "our reality of life in our early 20s was certainly different, more relaxed than it is today. We always try to convey optimism in our songs, but this optimism is very desperate. The ambiguity is important."

So a song like "So viel zu sehn" with the line "Tell me a lie that I believe" is on the one hand a statement about the state of the world, but can also simply be a study of the state of a shattered togetherness. "What reminds one person of their private life, the next person connotes the state of the world," Klein explains, "our texts are very associative and open to wide interpretation. People often write to us on TikTok or Instagram and ask us what this or that line stands for. I always say it stands for what you want it to stand for." Musically, the band meanders between laid-back soul-funk and jazzy 6/8 time. Nevertheless, Buntspecht once again manage to convey an incredibly light-footed catchiness in their innate complexity. Some are overwhelmed by Klein's high vocal timbre, others by the incomprehensibility of the genre - but it is the sprawling musicality and a flair for songwriting that allows a seemingly uncommercial band like Buntspecht to scratch the surface of mass taste.

Escaping certainty
"The question often arises as to whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. With us, it's usually both. Today, everything has to be divided into good and bad, black or white, happy or sad. But if the shades of gray are receding in the world, then they should not be in art. We humans need the certainty that a year has twelve months and an hour has 60 minutes in order to be able to stop where we are. That's why it's all the nicer that you can have projects that defy these norms. We play with the color palette and see what can be realized where. We don't claim to be political value mediators, but we have our world view from which you can draw your conclusions. I'm a fan of the abstract, the surreal and the associative. Art must make room for the dreamlike." You can immerse yourself in Buntspecht's sound worlds chronologically or in a confused manner. "Konstrukt 5" is another form of drawing norms that can best be described as a sound experience. Today, optimism has to be earned - but art can also be demanding.

Live in Austria
Buntspecht are currently on an extensive tour with their album "Konstrukt 5". The Austrian dates: May 22 at Cinema Paradiso in St. Pölten, May 23 at the Klagenfurt Festival, May 30 at the Dornbirn Dynamo Festival, September 20 open air at the Vienna Arena, December 2 at Dom im Berg in Graz, December 3 at Salzburg Rockhouse and December 4 and 5 at Treibhaus Innsbruck. All information and ticket purchase options can be found at www.buntspechtband.at.