Debut album by the Berlin Morning Stars: The stars are slowly dimming out

Difficult, yet designed with a light hand: keyboard surfaces from the mid to late eighties, unison singing from the late sixties and timelessly intricate, accented drums – this is how the debut album of the Berlin quartet The Morning Stars begins.

“One Of The Doors”, the title of the opening song, is four minutes long and is one of two shorter songs on “A Hymn Without A Sound”. Immediately after that, things get epic: “Can’t Stand Up” can actually be heard as a secret hymn to the slow awakening. The song thrives on repetition, fingerpicking and underlying nervousness and lasts almost eight minutes. The singing starts just before minute three.

Confessions to epicness, two or three songs in one, but with an airy gesture and psychedelic drive, this is how the sound world of the Morning Stars spreads out. The band started as a birthday present for drummer Sebastian Vogel (also with Kante). Knowing that a new year of life would seem like a challenge to him, decided keyboardist Barbara Morgensternguitarist Felix Müller-Wrobel (also Kante and formerly with the band Sport) and Bassist Alex Paulick (formerly Kreidler)to give her colleague a new band. In Berlin you could see the Morgensterne in January 2025 at the Theater Hebbel am Ufer as the opening act for the electronic pop duo Tarwater experience in a meaningful combination.

Drift off in style

There, too, a love of the sophisticated and expansive was noticeable, to which the Morning Stars should definitely remain true. The fact that they shortened their songs to three to four minutes in two of the three previously released video singles may be intended as a concession to the short attention span of the zeitgeist, but just a reminder: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhausthe song with which Gothic began in 1979 and which is considered a prime example of the stylish drifting off that the Morgensterne also practice, clocks in at a total of nine minutes and was released exactly as a single.

Instead, the imaginary A-side of “A Hymn Without A Sound” – the album is initially only available as a download and CD – ends with the spacious ballad “Like This”. It lasts seven minutes, and then it makes sense to think about the band name.

Its most obvious interpretation is the surname of their keyboardist and singer, but the contemporary Morgenstern opens up another field. In Roman mythology, he and with it the planet Venus go by the poetic name Lucifer. The pop world is more familiar with the bringer of light than its inhabitants always realize.

Then “Morning Star” is also the name of a British daily newspaper and the title of a six-minute film by the British art rock band Henry Cow. The band and the paper, which existed until 1979, are decidedly left-wing, with the band sounding rather unorthodox while the paper stays on the party line.

About the second half of the album: After the compact four minutes of the song “Scars”, the stars slowly extend their claws. “Chainsaw Fiddle” is built around synth strings, guitar and drums and amazes with a noise-pop déjà vu after the second verse.

The lyrics play through different variations of “Once upon a time”: daydream, limit, illusion of order and danger. An invitation into nostalgia would sound different.

The last two songs are massive pieces. “Trap”, another eight minutes, lives from a sophisticated interplay of funk rhythms and jazzy guitar, from initially subtle, then present electronics and hints of Dub effects. In a relaxed coda, the stars slowly dim.

“The Everything”, the finale, picks up with Morse signals and edge hits on the drums. In the first of nine minutes the song turns into widescreen pop, in the second it returns to its minimalist intro. The pendulum swings two or three times until the vocals come into play on a deep keyboard track.

Pause once, then the morning stars repeat the album title “A Hymn Without A Sound” like a mantra and in unison. The four-person orchestra pit rises, rises sky-high and makes a point. Spikes look good on him.