Buntspecht

The confusion begins with the title: “Konstrukt 5” is the name of the new album by Viennese group Buntspecht, and of course you relate this directly to the number of albums they have released so far, until you realize that “Konstrukt 5” is the sixth Buntspecht album, not the fifth. This makes it clear that Buntspecht cannot be categorized with a bourgeois sense of order or any classical category at all.

Much more important for understanding the group Buntspecht is the word before the number anyway: A construct, according to Duden – and now it’s getting slightly awkward! – a “working hypothesis or mental auxiliary construction for the description of developed phenomena”, is always and forever everything that Buntspecht do, because this music automatically has something temporary, unstable and fragile inherent in it, therein lies its appeal. It’s about the power and the magic of the moment, about what is right now and what you can make of it. Spoiler: A lot!

Lukas Klein’s voice, which is already quite high-pitched and sometimes pleasantly reminiscent of Hamilton Leithauser, almost tips over into hysteria for a brief moment at the beginning of the first single “Im Fluss” when he sings: “No matter what tomorrow brings, no matter what.” No wonder: you really have to be completely stupid, hysterical, insane to claim in all seriousness in these times: “Today it’s nice, yes everything is in flux, today is a good day”, which is why Lukas hurries to sing afterwards: “Everything goes down the river”. Konstrukt 5 operates in this field of tension

In the late winter of 2024, singer and guitarist Lukas Klein met with Florentin Scheicher (piano, vocals, trumpet) for a first session in an old house belonging to Klein’s family at the foot of the Rax mountains, which was to lay the foundations for “Konstrukt 5”. There was still snow on the peaks, the first green shoots were sprouting in the valleys, the air was clear and their heads were free.

The vibe for this session was: at the slightest feeling of resistance or unwillingness, the idea is abandoned and another is pursued. The two musicians were interested in radical lightness. “We locked ourselves away there for a week and had a lot of fun,” says Lukas Klein. “We worked on song ideas every day from nine in the morning until three in the morning.”

Layers and samples from these sessions found their way unchanged onto the final album – small constructs, if you will. These miniature artefacts formed the basis of an album that was finally – as always with Buntspecht – worked out together in the original line-up of Antonia Luksch (cello, vocals), Roman Geßler (saxophone), Florian Röthel (drums) and Jakob Lang (bass), supplemented by further songs and recorded in the studio.

Moods and composition were almost more important than the lyrics, melodies were in the foreground: “The lyrics often emerged from the composition this time,” says Lukas, “otherwise it was usually the other way around: the music had to follow the lyrics.” A way of working that the entire band found extremely liberating, because they were able to completely immerse themselves in the music.

The band’s work on songs is still largely intuitive, almost unconscious. And perhaps the album owes its bittersweetness to this approach. The basic attitude on Konstrukt 5: optimism born of fatalism. “Everything goes down the drain”, for example, was one of the first lines that Florentin had freestyled on the unfinished song, but then it became “Everything stays in flux.” You can’t let all the madness out there get you down completely, even if it’s not always easy.

“It’s not so easy right now,” confirms Lukas. “Wars, crises, Trump, Gaza – it’s almost impossible to write light pieces in these highly politicized times. You don’t want to have these topics one-to-one in your art, but of course they are automatically a part of it. My aim is to internalize this and not to negate it, but at the same time to maintain a certain lightness.” In this respect, “Konstrukt 5” is the outstanding artistic document of a constructive approach to gloom.

The work on “Konstrukt 5” was always also a rebellion against circumstances, a struggle for beauty and an attempt to preserve a piece of it. “Way Down Alley” embodies this approach musically like hardly any other piece, a psychedelic flow that leads to infinity.

Way Down Alley” owes its existence to a minor accident: Florentin accidentally moved a track incorrectly when editing the song. “That was actually a mistake that resulted in something extremely interesting by chance,” says Lukas. “From there, we built up the piece together in the studio, albeit quite deliberately. Which is funny, because hardly any other piece sounds as spontaneous and jam-based as “Way Down Alley”.

Such spontaneous inspirations are essential for this band. The ballad “Vom Kopf der Hut”, the elegiac “Die Stadt in dir”, the spoken word meditation “Was hält dich hier?” – these songs give you confidence in a gentle way, are surrounded by a beguiling melancholy and inspired by superb musicality. They allow you to carry on in the knowledge of the darkness.

“I never really understood how fast the wind blows”, sings Lukas Klein in the grandiose, sparkling “Wenn du jetzt gehst”, the chorus of which you never forget once you’ve heard it. But who understands that?

Buntspecht’s indie chamber pop has a dystopian romanticism, a radically wild beauty, an insane intensity and a sincerity and artistic freedom that is unparalleled these days. Because he knows about our powerlessness. In this way, Buntspecht provide warmth and hope in dark times.