Despite one of the healthiest and most interesting bodies of work of anyone in Berlin’s electropop circuit, Barbara Morgenstern has never been a name. Even when compared against the relative successes of artists like, say, Lali Puna or The Notwist, Morgenstern has always flown under the radar, content to make thoughtful and often brilliant records destined to be namechecked by everyone from Ellen Allien to the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, but ultimately bought and heard by a pathetic few.
Seven years on, there’s new cause for hope. While The Grass Is Always Greener marks her fifth full-length album, it arrives at a time unlike any other in Berlin’s last decade. Gone, seemingly, is the rigid ideology that once stratified Berlin’s verdant electronic output into self-contained parking zones. The ensuant conflation and interbreeding of once closed gardens like Tresor house, minimal, sleaze techno, Morr Music electropop, post-IDM, neo-kraut, sound design and whatever else had its own subsection in your favorite electronic record store once upon a time has left those barriers decimated; now, everyone’s a dilettante with a clear field of vision -- greatness practically demands it.
Berlin’s increasing predilection toward formal pop structure is another development working in Morgenstern’s favor. Though she’s certainly made overtures to pop conventions on prior outings, The Grass Is Always Greener finds her working more assuredly within the form. As proof she’s thinking as much about melody as she is texture, piano features heavily this time around. Set mostly against backdrops of burbling synths and minor-key choruses, it provides Morgenstern with a clear melodic anchor and a warm counterpoint to her brittle rhythms. Its classical connotations have the added bonus of sparking off the album’s otherwise forward-looking sounds, something that serves its theme well.
For clues on that theme, we need look no further than the title track, which, despite its name, is sung primarily in German. The conceit is one of many on the record to allude to the notion of in-betweenness (culturally, spiritually, musically) that dominates throughout. Conceived while Morgenstern travelled countries as disparate as Japan and India on her Goethe-Institut-backed 2005 world tour, The Grass Is Always Greener has a wistful, almost punchdrunk quality to it, its chord progressions always hairpinning somewhere unlikely.
Also worth mentioning: the punchy and sorta sideways lead single “The Operator”, which has a whiff of Devo to it; the turbulent key changes of the gorgeous “Polar”; the simple piano balladry of “Das Schöne Einheitsbild”. But really, there’s barely a dud to be found, not even as the album takes on a busier and slightly more industrial aesthetic near the end. Confident, crafted and feminine, this is Morgenstern’s finest record yet-- let’s hope she gets the audience she deserves.
