Watch: The Building “The Breath I Inhaled From You”

29 Oct 2013 — Henning Lahmann

Here's the thing: pop music from Germany usually fails (no matter if sung in English or German), and watching the disaster unfold gets always more painful the more ambitious the artist's original concept had been. Keeping that in mind, it must be considered almost a marvel how pleasant and compelling The Building's work turns out. After all, the artistic ambitions here seem almost insurmountably high indeed, and from the outset, the band has made sure that no one is left in doubt about that fact – ironic or not, that first 'interview' video posted early last month (watch it!) comes dangerously close to the line between conceptual art and ridiculous ineptitude, and I'm not sure whether or not the line is actually crossed a couple of times during the piece's four-minute running time. What is more, one debut album apparently didn't suffice for this Hamburg trio's aspirations. Instead, we get the same album twice, on two different labels, or rather, what we are confronted with are the same eight songs in different orders, once in a pop-friendly, guitar-focused guise, accompanied by an LP that showcases The Building's electronic side (though calling it anything similar to techno as suggested by the interviewer would certainly be a stretch, what we hear is rather reminiscent of some sort of vaguely post-wave synth music).

We get it. Meta pop is a thing these days. It however remains unclear whether it really needed the sledgehammer to get the point across. Because at the end of the day, what we have before us are truly great pop songs, not least due to the fact that they deliberately do not shy away from any grand gestures, a thing we haven't seen coming from Hamburg in quite a while. The good thing: it works. The three musicians that form The Building probably know best what they are trying to achieve, and they deserve the benefit of the doubt even where the concept appears to be over the top (and I haven't even quoted from the press release yet). That being said, it is almost a relief to watch the restrained visualisation of the truly beautiful ballad "Every Breath I Inhaled From You", a minimalism that is both stylish and artsy without getting trapped in some overblown staging that could only obstruct the music's elegance. The album, both albums, contain more of such gems that may not reinvent pop music but serve the listener's desires on a level that is distinctly not meta in any way whatsoever, so we'll leave it to those who want to keep looking for transcendence in order to find those other facets that might or might not be there.

Building Part 1 and 2 are released on November 1 by Clouds Hill and Questions & Answers, respectively.