Album Review: Sweet Silence by Barbara Morgenstern

Berliner Barbara Morgenstern has been responsible for some of the loveliest music of the last decade or more, throughout a productive career that's seen her maintain a consistently recognizable aesthetic -- balancing sweetness and warmth with a slight, distinctly Teutonic frostiness -- while her sound has evolved from bleepy, toylike indie electronica to sprightly techno-pop to more fully organic, expressively artful songwriting. Sweet Silence, her sixth proper (solo) full-length, tweaks that trajectory somewhat, returning to an almost entirely electronic palette (mostly understated drum programming and a battery of cuddly soft synths) after the piano- and full-band-dominated BM. But it also finds Morgenstern honing her popcraft and scaling back her artier impulses to yield her most concise, song-oriented and -- relatively speaking -- immediate work to date.

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As a writer you try all kinds of things when you’re just getting started. I remember sitting there in that basement of a downtown pub at a weekly reading series with my work in hand. I learned that there were several distinct types of people who attended these events. Two types tended to dominate ….

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The sixth album from Berlin-based techno-popette Barbara Morgenstern is chock full of minimalist arrangements, strong, textured bass lines and sparkling synths. It's an album that's at different turns lush, angular and liquid. While infinitely listenable, after some time it feels a bit constrained ?her slavish dedication to the three-minute pop form poses a barrier to the exploration of what could be some interesting sonic ideas, if only given a little more time to develop.

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