Dendemann – “Doch!” review: a boom-bap commentary on German rap
Not an album, not on Spotify: Dendemann's mixtape “Doch!” is only available via his own website. laut.de awards four out of five and praises his rhyming craft.
Archive image · Photo: Arne Müseler / www.arne-mueseler.com / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de (cropped and resized)
Dendemann does not make things easy for his listeners – and that is precisely the appeal. The mixtape “Doch!” came out on 29 September but is not on Spotify or Apple Music; for now it is only available via the website meinstream.org. According to Testspiel.de it was also sold on tour as a white-label vinyl. The singles “Wiederstand” and “Cliquehänger”, both with videos, preceded it.
laut.de writer Mathias Liegmal admits he first suspected a midlife-crisis record. Repeated listens, however, reveal plenty of current references: lines and samples from Nina Chuba, Xatar and Felix Kummer are chopped up and woven into Dende's boom-bap cosmos, alongside nods to Udo Lindenberg and Einstürzende Neubauten. Producer Tilman Hopf's beats stay restrained and let the lyrics lead. The project was reportedly made in just five days.
The verdict is clear: “Selten griffen Form und Inhalt so perfekt ineinander wie hier” (“Rarely have form and content meshed as perfectly as here”). The fact that the message never has to bow to formal complexity is Dende's great strength – and “Der Zweckreim ist sein Erzfeind”: the filler rhyme is his arch-enemy. The editors award four out of five.