DRITTE WAHL - Urlaub in der Bredouille

Finally a vacation, finally sun, finally a break from the rat race. But even in the traffic jam on the way there, the pleasure trip to the place of longing turns out to be a real horror trip. The route leads past abysses, reveals mined fields, stinking mountains of plastic waste and private beaches surrounded by barbed wire full of dead fish. Between glass monuments of late capitalism and thick chimney fog, election posters on the side of the road pay homage to the free market. Next to them, an old woman rummages through the garbage. The described "vacation in trouble" basically serves only as a semi-ironic metaphor - and yet the new record by Dritte Wahl comes surprisingly close to the odyssey described in its character. The new album by the deserving Rostock punk band is like a relentless sightseeing tour through dystopian landscapes. »Urlaub in der Bredouille« does not rest on rebellious pathos and simple opposition and calls the great miseries of our time by name: climate catastrophe, wealth distribution, corruption, housing shortages, inflation, the dominance of corporations and machines. The album is a soundtrack to the downfall, an angry attempt to break out of the matrix and a creative encouragement at the same time, it is a loud, courageous hybrid of anger, gallows humor, idealism and slapstick.

The constant dance between resignation and residual hope, as well as the credible confrontation with political imbalances, has always been part of Dritte Wahl's DNA. Founded in 1988, the band played its first concerts on the soil of the former GDR. After reunification, Dritte Wahl managed to organically rise to become one of the most successful German-speaking punk rock ensembles - but the band never lost its close connection to the subculture. Several amazingly well-aged classics and a few changes in the band's line-up, some of which were caused by tragic events, Dritte Wahl has managed in recent years what very few old hands in the business have managed: keep growing. "Geblitzdingst" from 2015 was the first record in the foursome's joint history to enter the German album charts, and their last LP "3D" even climbed to number six. This was followed by the biggest tour in the band's history - although it was postponed several times due to Corona. The audience? More mixed than ever. The quadriga? Well oiled. With the release of their twelfth studio album »Urlaub in der Bredouille«, Dritte Wahl will celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary in late autumn 2023. Instead of a nostalgic best-of record, Gunnar and Jörn 'Krel' Schroeder, Stefan Ladwig and Holger H. are releasing ten brand new songs. The message is unmistakable: Dritte Wahl are alive and far from tired.

The best proof of the band's inexhaustible energy: the explosively triumphant opener "We're shooting the billionaires into space", a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment with a blatant message. In "Simulation" you look in vain for ironic ambiguity - accompanied by ominous guitars and metal-esque double bass, Gunnar Schroeder paints grim pictures of a sick society in overdrive. The driving title track "Holiday in trouble", a feature with rock singer Deine Cousine, becomes increasingly cynical and ends in a deceptively harmonious finale: "Hand in hand through acid rain and a tornado blows bouncy castles towards us". The change of perspective typical of Dritte Wahl, "Panama", which tells the blood-stained family history of a business dynasty that is still well-off today, is followed by the encouraging, hymn-like "Keine Zeit für weiße Fahnen". In keeping with the band's old tradition, Dritte Wahl plays with pitchfork metaphors here - disguisedly addressed to the profiteers of globalization and the so-called G20: "People are fed up with this new monarchy [...] are no longer falling to their knees before would-be rulers."

"Das regelt der Markt" (The Market's Rules), which was released as a single in 2022 and is dominated by keyboard playing at the beginning, is an angry swan song for the visibly crumbling dogmas of neoliberalism. The volcanic-sounding chorus, in which Schroeder's infamous howling reaches its peak, contains a very concrete message: "Growth and acceleration shake hands and then drive together at full speed into the wall."
In the last third of the album, the focus shifts to more obscure topics. »Edwin Aldrin« tells the tragic biography of the second man behind astronaut
Neil Armstrong again, "The Spy", a feature with the Leipzig band 100 Kilo Herz, tells the funny, fictional story of an alcoholic double agent in the Cold War. "Steine im Weg" - a sincere get-up-and-go song for the desperate and the striving - is followed by "Statistik", the musically relaxed finale of the album. Instead of drifting into farewell pathos, Dritte Wahl deals with tendentious data analyses - final proof that the Rostockers have not given up on their immense need to talk or the holiday resort of Bredouille.