We’re huge fans of German Error Message, the project of Nashville’s Paul Kintzing. After a hiatus, German Error Message returned in March with Mend, an album “loaded with foreboding and humane warmth” as we described in our review. Following that was standalone single ‘Fine‘, which explore new waters, a song that we said “possess[ed] a colourfulness that verges on joy.”
Now the project is back with a new double single, two suitably autumnal tracks to hold on to during the approach of the cold. Kintzing wrote and recorded these songs in the fall of 2016, and they’re finally getting released three years later. “These songs were my first attempt at writing again after not making music for several years,” he explains, describing how a desk job left him feeling burnt-out and disconnected. These songs proved an important step in his attempts to re-organise his life around music, and although it must have worked (just see the German Error Message releases from the last few years), Kintzing struggled to finish them off. That is until recently, when he returned to the songs with “fresh ears and openness,” and completed them for release last month.
With its “weird-pop hooks and reversed guitar solos,” ‘What Welcoming’ is the more lush and rounded of the two tracks, steady percussion and layered guitars. In comparison, ‘Hand Comes Down’ is a powder-soft take on folk classic folk arrangements, built on a warm and bubbling bed of background ambience. It’s more akin to classic German Error Message, with the chill and internal warmth of a walk through a crisp late autumn night.
Despite the stylistic differences, both songs meditate on a common theme, what Kintzing describes as “reckoning with self-destruction, moments of clarity, and making constant, conscious choices to be present in one’s own life.” “What welcoming was in me then? What calming wind?” Kintzing asks on ‘What Welcoming’, presumably during one of those moments of clarity. “When my heart had opened up, accepting some wisdom.” It’s just one example of a blossoming hope at the heart of these two songs, a landmark moment which saw Kintzing reach a dawning realisation and get his life back closer to where he envisaged it. Nowhere is this clearer than a repeated line at the end of ‘Hand Comes Down’, seven words which encapsulate he complexity of feeling that is captured in these two sort songs.
“Forgot how it felt to be good”