Get Well Soon
Vexations

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TRACKLISTING:
01. Nausea
02. Seneca's Silence
03. We Are Free
04. Red Nose Day
05. 5 Steps_ 7 Swords
06. We Are Still...
07. A Voice In Le Louvre
08. Werner Herzog Get Shot
09. That Love
10. Aureate!
11. We Are Ghosts
12.  A Burial At Sea
13. Angry Young Man
14. We Are The Roman Empire
 
CDL version includes a bonus disc containing eight more tracks and a 20 page 16cm x 19cm hard cover book with coloured linen (and embossing), including a 32 page sketch book.
                          
OVERVIEW:
‘VEXATIONS’: that’s the title Konstantin Gropper has given his second album. To him it’s not just the title of a piano piece by Eric Satie, but it’s above all an expression of discomfort, disenchantment and anger. Of the disharmony through the world. Of the human conflict of wanting “to fit in” whilst simultaneously wishing to be left “alone”.
 
Under the pseudonym Get Well Soon Gropper left a significant musical mark on 2008. His debut album ‘Rest Now Weary Head! You Will Get Well Soon’ was swiftly recognised as a musical revelation. Gropper was cheered and applauded alternately as a musical redeemer from Oberschwaben and a smart and thoughtful alumnus of the Mannheim Pop Academy. Both were inaccurate of course, because he is neither a redeemer, nor did he ever suggest that the academy was a key factor in his musical career. Nevertheless the general public was amazed by the warm sound of this band. German newspaper FAZ asked incredulously, “Where does he come from?” French periodical Les Inrockuptibles described him as “the invaluable alternative to the Tokio Hotel phenomenon”, while NME immediately dubbed him the new “German Wunderkind”.
 
Two years later, hugely enriched by heavy touring, Konstantin Gropper is ready to step out again. His eagerly awaited follow up, he explains, is a concept album about The Stoics. In brief, stoicism is the philosophy of emotional self-possession. (This, of course, is a very important subject to the folk at City Slang who aspire to higher wisdom through calmness and a greater peace of mind.) But, asides from the issue of the name Konstantin Gropper has chosen for his second album, there’s an equally important question: how did he manage to conceive, compose and record this new creation within two months when his debut record took 23 years?!
 
“Last year,” Gropper explains, “I appeared with my music in public for the first time, and the experience was incredibly positive but at the same time very strange. Perfect strangers listened to me – at least they did for a while – and some told me that my work really meant something for and to them. Plus,” he adds with a gentle smile, “I moved to an overcrowded metropolis. Both of these – my new status and the undeniable ‘expectations of the listener’ (I’d rather avoid calling it ‘pressure’) – as well as loads of new impressions left me kind of perplexed in advance of this second record. Time passed and I distracted myself with commissioned film scores. I had so much work that all of a sudden there was not much time left, not as much as I had hoped to have for writing the album. But today I can say that this was actually a stroke of luck. This way the working process was totally different to the debut album. It was compact, more concentrated and well rounded. 80% of the songs arose in a total period of two months (or at least the structures did).”
 
‘VEXATIONS’ starts with field recordings made behind his parents’ house and ends with the fall of the Roman Empire. In between you’ll find Werner Herzog, Seneca (probably the best known Stoic and the ‘spiritual godfather’ of this record), Georg Büchner, Homer, Peter Sloterdijk, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Sartre, the latest findings about conflict studies, questions about whether anger is an inevitable part of human nature, and every artist’s fear of irrelevance (as seen through the eyes of Moby Dick.) Considered in terms of content (or indeed on a purely philosophical level), this record is crammed to the brim. It’s so overflowing that one might think there’s no space left for music. But there you’d be mistaken. The opulent cornucopia of melodic depth and artful arrangement that Gropper, or rather Get Well Soon, pours forth at the willing listener is not only absolutely record-breaking but also full of such beauty, maturity and majestic dignity that it seems truly overwhelming at first. Recorded in a proper studio with a real string quartet and wind section for the first time, “this recording”, Gropper says, “finally sounds like I always wanted it to sound and not like an accumulation of inadequateness”.
 
‘VEXATIONS’ has turned out to be a worthy successor to a wonderful debut. An artistically outstanding and endlessly rich creation that, despite reaching a whole new level sonically, doesn’t aim at singles, the radio or the charts, it stoically and effortlessly continues to do exactly what Get Well Soon have always done: to reach out to people and touch their souls.