Review Pop music

Total

Jede Nacht derselbe Traum

The Outer Edge • 2023

Oliver Geissen has said everything there is to say about the eighties. Yet, there are still bands who give themselves meaningful 80s names like Ideal, Egal or the one we have here, Total. And for those who’ve never heard of them, they’re basically like The Outer Edge. But because it’s the eighties and people had nice hair back then, you give them a listen. Either a Thomas or a Michael usually sings. He also plays guitar, because Ralf, who some people called Ulli, and Günther, who was always called Günther, played drums and keyboards. In 1900-something, Ulli was replaced by Sabine or Andrea and then everything was much better. Bands in the eighties always came from somewhere, from Wuppertal or Düsseldorf for example, and less often from Ingolstadt, and when things go wrong, as they did with the Total experience, sometimes from Stuttgart. There was definitely something going on in the eighties, so at some point you met up with so-and-so, because he was the one who made this or that band big. But when you wanted to play him that great song you’d so stylishly recorded on your state-of-the-past 24-track, the guy refused to listen. Whereupon the budding hit ended up as a great Xmas gift in the unhelpful hands of some relatives. Or a few decades later as a so-called classic on the turntables of people who grew up with Oliver Geissen’s lie.