FREIBURG • Brief & Siegel • LP

This Charming Man Records

With Freiburg, it’s kind of like what I imagine it must feel like when your kids move out of the house. They start out small, and you have all this good advice for them — which they take at first, but eventually turn into something even better. Time just flies. One day they’re still shaky on their feet, and the next they’ve got their driver’s license and want their own place. That probably makes me sound like I’m 60 and the guys are 18 — it’s not quite like that, but my heart’s been with these guys for a long time. I saw them wobbling around at our yard sale, and three years later they’re no longer boys but full-grown men with beards and everything…

Somehow, Freiburg’s “Brief & Siegel” album feels like growing up — like an emancipation from their influences, a shaking off of the past. Because “Brief & Siegel” is the masterpiece — a shining example of great songwriting, a love letter to the two-and-a-half-minute punk song, a bow to that heart-on-the-sleeve honesty that sometimes hurts but is always real. That’s my Freiburg: good guys, with amps that kick and fire in their chests.

Emancipation doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting what you’ve learned or where you came from — in Freiburg’s case, it means keeping the good and shaping it into something truly their own. Sure, you can still hear Turbostaat, Oma Hans, and all that Hanseatic punk in their songs. But the trick is stamping it with the Freiburg seal. You hear it in the little details, in the pissed-off songs Tom sings, in the small excursions into 90s US emo (Kanüle Abwärts). It’s right there that the guys shed their old influences and build their own new Freiburg universe.

The absolute hit of the album is “Sommer, Roggen und Er”, where Tobi Neumann from Duesenjaeger joins Jonas for a duet — and what came out of it is a first-class earworm with full-on anthem potential.