Herr Vorragend’s debut album has probably got a little for everybody out there. Whether it is a funk that rocks your boat, a bit of indie, electronica, or acoustic pop, Die singende Diskokugel is an engaging and promising debut from start to finish.
Herr Vorragend is an artist, a singer and a songwriter hailing from the German capital city Berlin. After a decade confined to an office career, Boris Kunofski, also known as Herr Vorragend, finally claimed back his creative spirit, squeezed it, and managed to collage together an extremely vivid debut. Die singende Diskokugel, as probably suggested by its greatly extroverted and colorful album art, is a very vivid release. With 13 songs, the album jumps with great flexibility from one genre to another, leaving nothing behind but a certain flair left by the roomy and organic instrumentation that’s utilized throughout the album, alongside warm and lush, roomy mixes that live and breathe, regardless of genre.
The shorter song lengths on Die singende Diskokugel make most of these songs very easy to digest pop music nuggets with a distinctive soul living within them. Herr Vorragend’s voice is mixed intimately close and dry, a perfect mix for the album’s mix of jangly and wooden electric guitars, roomy-sounding drums and pianos, and charming, almost minimal mixes that bustle with musical intricacy from their limited instrumental palette. Performed alongside his band The Sauce, Herr Vorragend’s music is fluidly uncategorizable, which drove Kunofski to pen down his own genre, naming the music Schlagerfusion, basing it upon Europop’s famous easygoing and radio-friendly schlager music.
Among the album’s best songs, we have the classic pop warmth of starter ‘Liebe’ and its vintage melodies and jangly rhythm guitars, we also have the expansive, reverb-drenched guitar goodness on ‘Vogel’, the next song over which has one of the album’s most engaging and nuanced guitar performances. ‘Kleiner Johnny’ kickstarts the album’s humorous side, which becomes a mainstay throughout most of the songs that remain. The song itself is busy and a little addictive with its earworm melodies and whimsical electric guitar motif that only occurs twice throughout the song, injecting the mix with a stark moment of color.
‘Einsamer Baum’ might be what comes to mind when I think of German pop. Dark and looming, with a sense of drama in its hushed vocal deliveries and restrained arrangement. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the fun and groovy ‘Tanz’, with its low-tempo, tight, reggae-inspired groove adding a bit of rhythmic juiciness to the album’s latter half. ‘Palme’ is a bustling and bright pop song with a Beatles-like level of musical jangliness. The mix is minimal and absolutely charming, and not devoid of musical and rhythmic intricacy. ‘Fitnessstudio’ is a short electropop stunner that recalls neon-lit electronica from the 80s, sounding infinitely German. Metropolitan, chic, and oddly-but-addictively colored.
There’s a lot to be gained from Herr Vorragend’s uber-vivid debut. Die singende Diskokugel is a wonderfully expressive and fluid musical experience that’s easily engaging enough to make its near-40-minute runtime fun and easy. A pleasant and humorous release that’s delicately balanced, Herr Vorragend’s debut is a very promising one.
