Colour Haze
We Are

For a certain period, more or less a couple of decades ago, Colour Haze was my favorite band.
The proof can be found especially on these pages: reviews, De Meeting, even an interview.
My interest started to wane somewhere between the release of "All" (2008) and the subsequent "She Said" (2012). Mostly due to the lack of new and noteworthy compositional ideas, but I also believe because the psycho-stoner binge of those years began to give me some digestion problems.

It ended up that, for several years, I lost touch with Stefan Koglek's band and, more generally, the whole micro scene revolving around the German label Elektrohasch: so much so that I barely listened to the next two albums ("To The Highest Gods We Know" from 2014 and "In Her Garden" from 2017), and almost always while I was busy with something else, whether it was writing poetry or going to the bathroom, it didn't make much difference.

These days, I'm listening to "We Are," the latest effort from the now-quartet German band, released in the surreal and somewhat paranoid climate of the lockdown in the last months of 2019.
I do this mostly in the early morning, before the rest of the family wakes up, like a little ritual of this strange, new routine, made of days all alike, phone calls to mom, video chats with friends, living room workouts, and Netflix.

I'm experiencing it as a sort of "refuge album," like a moment, a feeling, familiar and comfortable, with which to relax and not think too much.
The inclusion, at this point I would say permanently, of keyboardist Jan Faszbende (already present in "In Her Garden") has added jazzy prog nuances to Koglek's electric, rich and round guitar sound, which, although not steering the general sound too far from the hippie stoner shores, enriches it with a pleasantly more krautrock-like breath.

On the rhythmic level, then, it seems to me that never before in this album has drummer Manfred Merwald come into the recording studio with the clear intention of certifying that his penis is not only of an inconsiderate length but also has a lovely chestnut honey scent, which would allow him, if necessary, to give pleasure to your woman just with the vibrations of the snare drum while she looks for the papers in her wallet.

There are two beautiful instrumentals.
The first is "The Real." It's a build-up as clever as it is masterful, based on a scant few riffs, in which, however, I can't help but find landscapes, gazes, and colors, laden with a sort of majestic melancholy. The second is "Freude III," which always fools me with the way it mixes the liquid sound of the keyboards and the distorted coda's water-like bullying.

"We Are" seems to me a beautiful album.
I don't know if it would have made me fall in love with Colour Haze as that string of nearly perfect albums released in the early 2000s did at the time.
I don't even know if this judgment of mine is influenced by the climate of these days.
It doesn't matter much.

After all, it's just music.
Right?