There’s a way to write pop music which is still intellectually stimulating. Mary Ocher proves this with her second album Eden, produced by Canadian Rock & Roll guru King Khan (producer of the Black Lips among other acts), recorded in his legendary Moon studios and released on Buback on CD and digitally, and on Haute Areal for the vinyl edition.
The album contradicts the state of the music industry today, in its being an anti-thesis to everything that’s marked as “sell-able” these days: it’s raw, weird, lo-fi, minimalist, analog existentialist pop. It is influenced by anything from kraut rock (“The Road”) to oldschool psychedelia (“No Lesson Learned”) to ambient and cites anything from Nico to Brian Eno, via Suicide, Suzi Quatro, Sparks and Lene Lovich. You will find guitar-driven folk tunes (“Sweet Charity”) next to grim piano ballads (“The Android Sea”), garage (“Baby Indiana”) and towards the end it loosens itself in four minimal electronic pieces compiled into three tracks: “The Thunderbird Tetralogy”. These meditative, spheric ornaments lead us to a level of evolution where even the voice is lost. Eden is about life in various stages of degeneration of the human race: greed, xenophobia, remains of colonialism. But the thunderbird is a phoenix, it rises from its own ashes: „In death there can be life. How it got there, is a mystery to me.“
What Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs thinks about Eden: “Mary Ocher gives me the chills, she frightens me with her feral soul. Her sound is of a true outsider artist, immaculately self possesed. Was this recorded this century? Or out of a basement that’s she’s been imprisoned all her life? Time to set her loose on the world. I’m so happy she exists. Set me free Mary.”
Celebrate with Mary and her special DJ and live guests in Hamburg on the 5th and in Berlin on the 6th at Urban Spree with Jemek Jemovit, Alexander Geist, Lala By/Steev Lemercier, Peter Bäcker, Tusk, Severin O’Hara and Your Government.
More press on Spex, Rolling Stone, Subbacultcha!, Tagesspiegel, Zitty, Taz, Exberliner, Boston Hassle, Local Suicide, 13 questions, Killerrr, Hanseplatte, Zeit, SCHAUMSCHAU, Expatriarch, Finetunes, Shookdown, Pitch, Siegessäule, The one hit parade, Fresh Milk TV, Arte, Arte Creative and Reeperbahn Festival.
2013 top 20 of Intro Magazine for best song and album.
Video by Orange Ear, with Mary Ocher, King Khan, Jessie Evans, Steev Lemercier, Polina Y and Nadja Sayej.
Book Mary Ocher live solo or with Your Government worldwide HERE.
Text by Mira Stobbe.