All Bark and No Bite

I must say that the extremely merry atmosphere at Organ on Gay Pride Night overwhelmed me a bit upon entry, but in a moment I settled down with the thought of this gathering being an uplifting change from the rather sweaty and stiff atmosphere usually prevailing at the premises; the lovely and dear Organ we all know. It wasn’t very long until I discovered the reason for this peculiar happiness surrounding the crowd, but even though the attendants boasted of quite an amount of energy they couldn’t have matched the energy of their reason for happiness on their best day: the psychotic duo Stereo Total.     When they made their entrance on stage they seemed to me as a hipster couple stuck in the 90’s East-Berlin art outburst, in their shiny leather pants and with their hippie-like haircuts. When their performance commenced I found out I was to a certain extent right, but they had certainly more to offer than a nostalgic look. The music itself was really cheerful and a bit childish at times and would definitely have sounded plain naïve if it hadn’t been for their outrageous performance, which is undoubtedly their forte. The act of the male-part of the duo, Brezel Göring, was both explicit and provoking and whether he was abusing the band gadgets on the stage with his soothing hip-movements or jumping on tables hammering Organ’s chandeliers with drumsticks resulting in shattered glass and sparks raining all over the audience, you could always find somebody flabbergasted.     When overlooking the satisfied crowd, singing along with every single song, closing their eyes with a smile on their faces, the assumption that the performance was brilliant couldn’t be avoided. But was it? To me is was merely simple and clownish melodies combined with attitude which represented something new two decades ago but certainly not any more. Their multi-lingual singing was interesting at first but when they started namedropping Japanese idioms and Turkish say-ings it became more presumptuous than anything else. They are definitely charming, but the per-formance was primarily charming because of their encircled fans making it all look so wonderful.

WHO Stereo Total WHERE Organ