Momus - Pantaloon

Pantaloon sees Momus — veteran Scottish indie crooner Nick Currie — celebrating his return to Berlin (after eight years in Osaka) with a topical cabaret album which sets current political developments in a "neo-Weimar" of the imagination: a musical space influenced by Brecht and Weill's theatre songs, the tribal rock opera Hair, traces of psychedelia and echoes of post-punk groups like Wire and Magazine. These thirteen songs — recorded in rapid succession during August 2018, they're some of the most confident and heartfelt of Momus' long career —  address topics like Brexit, climate change, oligarchy and its unholy alliance with populism, and the new politics of borders, blood and soil. But they're also about the satisfactions of personal life, and how we can offset the shadows in the newspaper headlines (not to mention the onrush of mortality) with various kinds of optimism, and with love, sex, art, myth, and the imagination. The last word is given to Agnes Bernelle, a Berlin cabaret singer who settled in Dublin, having fought the Nazis by beaming black propaganda into Germany: "You want to be rich, well isn't that what you are?"