Funny Ha Ha:
Anna Erhard On Tour
Can music satisfy both in terms of credibility and comedy? It’s rare, alright. But, says Mike Pinnington, Berlin-based Anna Erhard carries it off with aplomb…
Swiss-born Berliner Anna Erhard’s third album, Botanical Garden (2024), has been on pretty regular rotation for me so far this year. It’s an album of wry observations and anecdotes drawing on the many absurdities, petty chicanery and microaggressions we face practically daily in this frequently less than wonderful world.
It is that rarest of things for a genre than frequently risks taking itself so seriously as to be po-faced: an indie-pop record that is both joyously catchy and funny – both resolutely ‘haha’ and, just occasionally, ‘peculiar’. Across the album’s nine tracks, Erhard – mostly gently – disarms, teases and occasionally disparages, almost to the extent that you begin to wonder whether a Netflix stand-up special awaits.
On the archly pedantic 170 we find a protagonist playfully insisting that their friend (or partner – the relationship is never made clear) is not “the same height as me” and that, in fact, they’re “about half a head shorter than me”. Here she makes winning a nothing argument a fine art. The candid Hot Family (who are, apparently, not simply hot, but “super smoking”), meanwhile, finds Erhard undertake some light stalking. And, with a caustic (entirely justified I might add) apathy for the Blue Man Group (B.M.G. Academy), her finely-tuned wit affirms what we knew all along – their brand of gimmicky spectacle isn’t worth leaving the house for, not even with a free ticket going spare: “Please bless me with a good excuse, I don’t wanna see the Blue Man Group!”
With a running time coming in at around the thirty minute mark, Botanical Garden never risks outstaying its welcome; just as, we’re sure, will be the case when Erhard – an indie-pop artist capable of weaving vivid vignettes of the day-to-day – rocks up primed for lols and more at Liverpool’s Art House Loft later this week.
Mike Pinnington
