Akkordion

2019 release. Back in 1987 Momus was in a London studio finishing The Poison Boyfriend, his debut album for Creation Records. Band of Holy Joy had a session the next day, so the 27 year-old Scot left a note wishing his friends well and adding: "You've got real accordions - I just use the horrible pre-programmed one in the DX7!" Thirty-two years later, now living in Berlin after a long spell in Japan, Momus finally purchased a real accordion from a junk shop on a street once split by the wall. Momus quickly discovered it's wide dynamic range, it's ability to stab, sob and wheeze and the ease with which chords could be pumped out using the buttons ranged down the lefthand side. Songs played on the new instrument (mixed in with sounds from the latest iPad apps) had a pleasing tendency to sound like Eisler's collaborations with Brecht during the late Weimar Republic years. Momus decided to make an album called Akkordion (the title mixes the German and English spellings) and drummed up sixteen new songs during the spookily hot summer. Many of them sound like garish clown music, political cabaret, surreal satire or radical vaudeville, with echoes of the accordion artists Momus knew in the neo-cabaret scene of 1980s London: The Pogues, Les Negresses Vertes, The Tiger Lillies, even solo Marc Almond and Nick Cave. What defines Akkordion is this tension between the light and dark: the bittersweet contrast between personal fulfilment and a political world dominated by division, toxicity and - let's face it - actual fascism. Like little Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum this accordion sends a scream through a world marred by disaccord.