PAAR

Bauhaus but Beach House. Sisters of Mercy but The Cure circa »Seventeen Seconds.« Joy Division but actually joyful. PAAR filters all their influences through a darkly tinted prism, which in turn emits the Munich trio’s dazzling music. The pared-down, rugged, gloomy post-punk of the eighties may be the foundation of their sound, but their debut album »Die Notwendigkeit der Notwendigkeit« (»The Necessity of Necessity«) proved that their spectrum is much broader. Slick new-wave touches, shoegaze leanings and, in between, straight-up pop: it all gets absorbed and recombined in different ways by PAAR. Ly Nguyen (vocals), Rico Sperl (bass, drum machines, synthesizers) and Matthias Zimmermann (guitar) manage to combine brutalist minimalism and emotional maximalism in an unprecedented way.