Originally self-released 2019 by Billy Zach. Hand numbered.

Whether bad moods always sound ill-tempered and good ones upbeat - the question has been unanswerable at the latest since even The Cure sang in a squeaky major key about boys who don't cry. When deep dark wave was suddenly allowed to sound as bright as a bell, Max Zacherl was only a rough concept in his parents' family planning, but somehow he imbibed the paradigm shift with his mother's milk. Under the artificial name Billy Zach, 32 years later the Bavarian-born Max Zacherl has created a sound in the flat-sharing room of his adopted home in Hamburg and pressed it onto hand-signed vinyl that is both deep black and radiant white, a kind of gothic light, so to speak, with songs that vibrate beneath the gloomy surface like analogue rave in a desecrated church.

Even the opener Elite seems as if Tom Waits had arranged to meet The Cramps for surf punk. Riot Circus loses pace, but not verve, before the guitar proclamation Fights drives us through dusty canyons like a Tarantino soundtrack. The key track on Shallow, however, is the epic Where Am I. With his grating voice, Billy Zach sings disgruntled lines like "Hate my life and live my hate / I am justified to share your rage". But in solo rock instrumentation to reflections on his gentrified metropolis, they swim in a river that sometimes surges, sometimes ebbs, before calmly flowing into the sea of a weirdly beautiful DIY manifesto that is rarely as bleak as dark wave has long since had to be.

- Jan Freitag - Freitagsmedien