It is always nice when, in the digital age, people still take the time to write a few personal lines on a piece of paper. This happened with ANNA LOHR from the Nuremberg area. It warms the heart of the reviewer and earns them some sympathy points right away. They even painted a Mickey Mouse for me, nicely with an arrow through the skull, as a little reference to the title of the debut album.
ANNA LOHR has been causing a stir on stages in the Nuremberg area since 2008 and has completed their first long player with “Amoklauf in Disneyland“.
The trio offers the attentive listener 15 songs that are everything but a cohesive work. It seems that ANNA LOHR approached the production with the maxim of playing as many styles as possible, thus conveying an image of an extremely creative band to the listener. The band indeed achieves this, even if it doesn’t make it easy for the audience. There simply isn’t a drawer where one could put the band.
While listening, I am reminded of influences from Knorkator, Blutjungs, Wizo, Die Kassierer, Fluchtweg, Strom, Berliner Weisse, and Die Ärzte (the old stuff, up to “Die Ärzte Früher”).
This is an enormous range that the band covers, yet only touches on the styles to some extent. ANNA LOHR has a very own style that is hard to categorize.
Somewhere between avant-garde German punk and Blutjungs, the band is roughly at home. I’ll leave the English-language songs aside for now, otherwise, it all wouldn’t fit anymore. It is rare that I get to hear something like ANNA LOHR. Usually, bands adopt a specific style and then operate within those boundaries. ANNA LOHR knows no boundaries. This surely doesn’t make it easier for the band in their search for gigs.
After multiple listens, some songs have crystallized that are particularly well done and thus deserve special mention here:
- [ALT] - A song that shockingly and dryly conveys the madness of everyday life, almost making it abstract and identifying the shackles of normal life as the reason for losing it.
- Maximale Verflüssigung - A confusing number that could come from Knorkator.
- Gedärm im Haar - The title really is like that! A track very close to Die Kassierer. Nonsense? Dadaistic provocation? Decide for yourself.
- Chef - An artistic, danceable ska number, especially the part with the girls in Thailand is a riot. For fans of morbid humor, it’s something quite fine.
For fans of somewhat different music, ANNA LOHR is a new star in the sky.
To the stylistically entrenched rest: “Tear off your blinders, there’s more to discover at the roadside.”
