Milky Chance
Le Poisson Rouge
March 17, 2017
March 2015 Clemens Rehbein and Philipp Dausch embarked from Kassel, Germany to New York City, wide-eyed in the afterglow of their debut Sadnecessary, an album which garnered explosive international appeal. Two years after their first North American tour, frontman Rehbein and DJ Dausch (think Macklemore and Ryan Lewis plus a guitar) rounded the block again with multi-instrumentalist Antonio Greger manning the bass and wailing Springsteen-style on the harmonica. On Friday, March 17, fans packed into the venue with enthusiastic magmatism to receive the group’s new album Blossom on the eve of its release. Those without tickets to the sold-out show loitered outside well into the first act in hopes of a stray scalper to reverse their luck. The set interwove old and new material—veering humbly away from the track-by-track order of events characteristic of album release shows. New tracks like “Doing Good” and “Ego” draw from the same kaleidoscope of genres—including reggae, deep house, and folk—which made their first album a success, with the addition of tropical influences that have since entered the pop musical mainstream. At one point, Rehbein momentarily quit singing, only to be serenaded back by his audience in perfect timing. A smile swept across his face and he verbally thanked the audience, as though suddenly privy to the bond between his fans and his music. “Peripeteia,” one of the performed tracks from Blossom, is also the Greek word for “sudden change” or “adventure”—a perfect capture of that moment.