Licht Und Schatten

• Track Listing

2017 release. 21 years of Rantanplan. Starting out as a powerfully driving pressure valve to release the inner rage of young twenty-somethings, three friends from Hamburg took the risk of doing something totally different: threshing yet melodic ska punk with German-language lyrics. Their anger became them even then, and so Marcus Wiebusch, Reimer Bustorff and Torben Meissner soon found themselves breaking into the local punk scene as a bloody brilliant German response to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. And the latter of the trio - his two pals having bid their farewells to join the Kettcar fold - has developed along with Rantanplan into a fixed point on the underground scene, always reliable and - despite all directional and line-up changes that subsequent years have brought - holding on to that basic sense of trust that is inherent to all pure motives: honesty, straightforwardness, assured edginess. And occasionally, where required, also wholehearted hate. Because although the years have passed, the anger has remained. And with it that inner field of energy that drives Rantanplan through every song and every artfully created line, preferably inspired by (frequently French) existentialists. Compared to earlier material, where their political and social statements were often seasoned with a sprinkling of humor, from corny to a fine sense of irony, these days a sober - or rather: disillusioned - realism prevails.