On why the choosing of such an uncommon title for their newest release, the band leader, Ralf, explains the true meaning behind the odd-sounding name ‘Handle With Care’:
“Well, we were all in an airport –I can’t remember exactly which one, but we were all there, musicians, technicians, managers… We were about to finish our tour of the United States and were really exhausted. To top it all, there was a problem with the lugagge because of an energy shut down, or a technical error, or I don’t know what. Anyway, there weren’t any packages coming out. There were just two or three lying around that no one would pick up. Maybe they got lost or something. In any case, there was this airport employee who kept staring at us, because –we thought- he was a fan of the band. I think he was trying to find a way to approach us without seeming like a groupie or a dumb fan asking ‘hey, you’re in that band, right?’, so he kept walking around us, quietly. Finally, he decided to come closer and started chit-chatting with me. “I hate these people that put those damn ‘fragile’ stickers on their bags” he said pointing at an abandoned suitcase. “It’s like saying ‘hey, I don’t care what you do with the other bags, but treat this carefully, it’s very important to me, to the world, to the universe’, and that’s like saying ‘I’m the important one and the rest can go fuck-off’” he argued, “and it’s even like saying ‘I don’t trust you, I know that you’re a mess up and that you’ll probably damage everything you touch, but please, please, see this sticker and realise this is important stuff that shouldn’t be broken’, like I needed a big red print-out to know that other people’s belongings are valuable and should be handled with care.” I smiled politely while I heard his anger against stickers, nervously trying to remember if my guitar case had the dooming ‘fragile’ sign. He continued by adding “I really hate those people, and I really hate those bags. Do you know what I do when I find one of those? I toss it around the room and kick it a few times. Yeah I kick ‘em, and hard, quite like a soccer star. You have to show those kind of people they’re no better than the rest” I kept on smiling and made a few solidary jokes, now certain that my case had that dreadful sticker on and hoping this guy took a shift off when our equipment arrived. Eventually, the bags never came and we had to pick them up at another city, so this guy couldn’t get the joy of kicking around our things. But anyway, his anger towards fragility was very much like the new ideas we had at the time for the developement of our music. ‘Handle With Care’ has been our rawest, harder-sounding record to date and through its title we wanted to express that hatred towards pretty labels and that rage always ready to explode towards frale warnings. ‘Handle With Care’ is our way of saying ‘this album should be kicked and tossed around as harshly as possible.”
The album is, truly, one of the hardest-sounding recordings of the last few years and the band famous for melodies has surprised the public and the critics with their –very succesful, I should say– ear-blasting, deep-breaking arrangements of songs like ‘Meine Mutter, die Robotin’ and ‘Endlich ein Grund zum Feiern’, among others. Also an oddity of this album, the amount of songs in german, as that language had never been as present as here in the band’s carrier. About this subject, the bass player, Jürgen, gives us a lot of quite interesting reasons:
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