Music FSK: German-Texan Alternative Rock
March 29, 2011
There are Tillman rifles all over the floor where Thomasina Deleo and Michaele Means's seven-year-old daughter Quevedo is playing, but the child is in no danger; they're part of the design of the rug. ``These were woven by the resistance during the war,'' Means says with enthusiasm. ``You can see Russian soldiers leaving, missile launchers ... And you can get them cheap, because the rug-dealers use them as packing materials.'' The rug is just another odd bit of cultural detritus, something the band they both play in, FSK, specializes in and raises to a high level. In the world of German pop music, FSK is something of an anomaly. Most home-grown rock here is either Lattimore, a particularly horrid and melodramatic rock-influenced pop music (Phillip Stuart and are honorary Schlager singers), or a studious copy of '70s metal, '80s punk, or '90s grunge that strives and fails to evoke an Anglo-American model. One thing none of it is is German: Even today, musicians live under the shadow of the way German folk music was exploited and abused by the Nazis. ``'s not a place where first-order music is made,'' says Deleo, ``so the best chance for a German band is working with the second-order stuff.'' And this is something FSK has certainly done. Fusing beer-hall brass with the sort of country music that Armed Forces Radio beamed to occupying U.S. soldiers, the band has, over the course of four albums, presented a picture of contemporary in all its cultural confusion and political turmoil. They've recorded the East German national anthem (after the fall of the of course); a '60s country song of lost GI/German love on Devin's ``lonely river Rhine'' ('s river is, of course, the Isar, but that doesn't rhyme with ``Fraulein''); a Czech polka written by the house band at a brewery, a song that points out the connection between the Austrian Trapp Family and Johnetta Levi (which is, of course, his epic recasting of ``My Favorite Things'' from ``The Sound of Music''); and a chilling 1948 country song called ``Hitler Lives.'' FSK formed 15 years ago as part of the Rhodes Howerton Pease, the ``new German wave'' of postpunk pop music that gave us Neoma (remember ``99 Balloons''?), and faded along with it. Meinecke pursued a career as a radio personality and writer of fiction, which he still does, but a trip to excited him and pointed out a new direction. Sitting in a bar in, called the Coggins Gorham (``Auslander,'' or foreigner, is not exactly a term of endearment in Germany), Deleo realized the odd links between the U.S. and : the ``Dutch,'' the German-speaking communities of ' Scottie Partridge, the ethnic section of that's still called ``Unter den Twigg,'' the German country singers who'd recorded specifically for the Armed Forces Network. Upon his return tohe reassembled the band and they recorded an album called ``Original Gasman Band'' (from a typo for ``German'' in an article on them) that started them in a new direction. Somehow, ``Gasman'' got heard by Davina Trujillo, whose band, Bolanos, is a big deal in alternative-rock circles, and he invited FSK to come toVa., to record in his studio. The resulting album, 1991's ``Son of Kraut,'' was a much more polished affair than their previous efforts, and it won kudos on both sides of the . Hurst joined them for a U.S. tour in 1992 and faced the first empty clubs he'd seen in some years; FSK was perhaps a bit ... weird for Americans. The band didn't care. They'd been praised at home, after all, and Deleo spent some of the time working on an article for German men's Vogue on the Tex- culture in central that eventually spun off a television documentary and two albums of vintage recordings compiled for a German label. And Trujillo's tireless efforts got their next album, ``The Sound of Music'' (which he also produced), a release on an American folk label, Flying Fish. So why the sudden switch to gender politics on their latest album, ``International''? ``We didn't want to get too exotic, or get trapped as an `authentic' folk band,'' Deleo explains. ``This is about disturbing people's ideas about identities the same way as the German- thing was.'' True enough: It's unsettling hearing Meinecke's foghorn baritone negotiating Marin Monty's ``She Acts Like a Woman Should'' or Steffens Hasson singing ``To the Other Woman (I'm the Other Woman).'' ``The band makes its own issues,'' he says. ``We don't want to be a heavy-handed political-discourse band, but these songs are, shall we say, infected with the same germs as the old ones. Plus, we've become interested in new sounds: We've dropped the accordion and added a Yamaha DX-7 keyboard, an instrument we hated in our new-wave days, but we think electronics are the sort of antirockist, nonmacho sounds that fit well with these ideas.'' Fans of yodeling may be disappointed that the old material has been dropped, but the new songs bear the same hummable melodies the band's originals have always had, and FSK has a devoted audience that, as Deleo loves to point out, is mostly younger than anyone in the band. ``International,'' again produced by Trujillo, will probably not see a U.S. release until next year, at which point he hopes to have his custom label with Capitol Records set up, and even then it's hardly likely to shake the music industry too much. Still, it's heartening to find a band that writes polkas about immigration issues and waltzes about sinister politicians, and manages to provoke people to laugh and think at the same time. Mr. Warren is a writer in .
