- DJ Koze has praised Die Vögel quite a bit in interviews, and if you know anything about his style, it's not difficult to see why he likes them so much. Like their first release, Fratzengulasch is halfway between an oom-pah band and an acid trip. "Blau Moschee" was more screwloose, though, while this is darker and more ornate, a Grimm Brothers fairy tale rather than a day out with the Smurfs. There are German vocals, sung by JaKönigJa, a band from Hamburg, that go, "I thought that you will be a bird / We will make a horse out of bones and rocks." The woozy horns later on take things even weirder.
Spadefuls of oddness are all well and good, but they don't necessarily make a good dance tune. The most impressive thing about "Fratzengulasch" is how all of the above adhere naturally to the neatly sculpted rhythm track. It's chunky, it has Koze-esque tongue-in-cheek ethnic percussion, and it swings wide and smoothly. The track ends up feeling loose and tight at the same time, and so does "Maikäferbenzin," which is less dark, and more serpentine. Jazzy clarinet squiggles and pitch-shifted rimshots give it a more driving kind of off-the-wall feel. It takes a moment in the middle for some wistful, muted horns. But, much like the single itself, in the end it's pretty much completely nuts.
Tracklist A Fratzengulasch
B Maikaferbenzin