It's just beautiful, that's the first thing you remember. Just don't grasp what you notice the second time you listen and then almost want to apologize for the compliment. Because what Linda Bender and Chris Schillinger have achieved with their third album "Dear Balance" reflects quite exactly its title. Songs like a successful walk over the beam with closed eyes, in which not the artistry but rather the courage, the chutzpah, the casual surprise. At first you light a candle and fill a glass with red wine, but gradually dark colours mix into the picture without dominating, but the careless consumption of delicacy is followed by the delicate need to reconsider what you hear. The music of the Mainz duo has meanwhile settled in comfortably between pop and folk, but loves excursions into foreign spheres so much that its listeners do not need a backrest. You sit up and sit in an upright position, and listen to it, because in the next moment - you don't really know it, but it is simply noticeable - monstrous things could happen. And then a song like "Harbour" comes along, starts like a melancholic but nice holiday stroll in the drizzle to the front of the mole and ends up as a requiem to the fleeing, stranded and lost of our days. Pop in minor can't sound more captivating. Bender & Schillinger are still a long way from despair and gloom, however, as a hunch they are only slightly scented in the air. The comparisons of earlier days are also becoming more questionable. While the last album "It's About Time" was a little bit reminiscent of Eurythmics or Rufus Wainwright, Depeche Mode or Joni Mitchell, the famous double has become his own trademark. Bender & Schillinger are still a completely independent duo committed to their own passion for doing business, and this is probably due primarily to the fact that they have refrained from following well-meant but ill-thought-out marketing concepts. Otherwise, producers or concepters would have driven out the almost vulgar, but ultimately dazzling basslines of a song like "Safe Inside" and sacrificed the wonderful fragility of "Goodbye" to hymnal pathos. Maybe "Lovelesson" wouldn't have been a rhythm instrument, and "Transition" shouldn't have recommended itself to the dancefloor. We went with the claim to record something that sounds like a unified whole and is designed with a lot of love for detail and also tries out many things in terms of sound and arrangement,"Linda said about," the last album. The noble intention was already put into practice at that time, but now Bender & Schillinger have gone at least one step further. Maybe it would be too early to talk about the fact that the two have created their own genre. But they're not too far away from that. This is the third time that "Harbour" has been going on this evening, and we are again and again running out of steam in our quest for comparable, comparatively wonderful things. Smiling. Or smiling? Anyway, I'd love to have
