Guterer Stoff von Deutschland

Sweden are well known for punching above their weight musically and are easily, along with the UK, US and Australia, the most prolific country for producing chartbound music. However, Germany have either been slowly improving recently or I just didn't notice them before, but I seem to be liking more and more German music than ever before this year. Let's ignore the obvious recent German success story - Cascada - here are some brilliant recent German language songs;

Cassandra Steen feat Adel Tawil - Stadt

Stadt has been one of the biggest selling hits of the year in Germany, spending eight weeks at No.2 but never quite reaching the top. That's ok though, because for most of that period it was the fantastic Jungle Drum by Emiliana Torrini that kept it from No.1!!! Stadt is a fantastic pop song with slight R&B influence from singer Cassandra providing a thumping chorus and more soft bridge whilst Ich + Ich singer Adel Tawil provides the brilliant verses. All of this is delivered over a powerful bassline and military beat not too dissimilar to Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us. With an English translation, this could be big here. Although the video and the lyrics are a real social statement, talking about the economy and life today, so perhaps the song would seem too preachy if it came out over here...



Ich + Ich - Pflaster

I can't embed the video for this one but it's well worth watching as it's the only decent version of the song available on youtube. Adel Tawil has gone back to his band to make a storming comeback single after their huge native success in 2007/2008 with their last album. Pflaster is a brilliant pop song which almost sounds like the best Bond theme that there never was in places. It's already stormed to #1 on German iTunes so they clearly haven't lost any of their success there, which is lucky as they are hardly the sort of band that would be able to rely on UK/US success, they are just too different and the video to this new single is just odd.

Eisblume - Eisblumen

Generally, I'm not a fan of gothic music and I'm not a fan of German language music, so this should by all rights be a disaster...except for the fact that it's absolutely beautiful. The sort of thing that would keep Evanescence relevant, well if it were in English of course. Really nice animated video too. Not quite up there with My Immortal though come to think of it...