The album describes the progression from early evening hours to the early morning hours, and like every all-nighter, there is the inevitable lull…When the sax and her voice are bouncing off each other, or Spunk’s voice showers down with streamers of electronic piano, they are at their best.
[Release page] In Leipzig, the band says, everything is just around the corner. An electronic-acoustic hybrid, Marbert Rocel formed in 2002 when one of the many nearby musicians who dropped by DJ Malik and Panthera’s place, vocalist Spunk, moved in and stayed. The two he’s and and she ”spend most of their time looking out of the window and smoking” and the band certainly does try to exude a distracted, jazzy ennui. But their collective existential moue is often too cheerfully illuminated with bright, blinking neon for them to hold a straight, world-weary face for long.
The opening track wonders if love is nothing more than just something to do, while the next few ditties have a far more positive, even joyfully naïve enthusiasm for such cynicism to stick—”I want to be a song for you.” It is this cool blue standoffishness and rosy warm, close cuddling that betrays the fickle heart of Small Hours. Sometimes it’s handholding in the rain, at others a cold shoulder on a sunny day. Though slim and stiff as a flute of white wine, it sprays champagne bubbles on tracks like the dancey “I Wanna” and skanking admonishment of “The Evening.”
The album describes the progression from early evening hours to the early morning hours, and like every all-nighter, there is the inevitable lull—here almost exactly midway through in the form of a “lax” (their own word) saxophone workout and limp love song sung by one of the boys. The boys’ tunes and the girl’s voice need each other. When the sax and her voice are bouncing off each other, or Spunk’s voice showers down with streamers of electronic piano, they are at their best.
Small Hours is available on Compost. [Release page]
