This weekend, I forget if it was Saturday or Sunday, Spouse came in from walking the dog and took off his handyman’s pants (that’s trousers to those of you living in those parts of the English-speaking world where pants are underwear). In true East German clothing is optional style, it took him a few minutes too long to get around to pulling on the loose black fleece bottoms of the elasticated waist, a prime example of the sort of athleisurewear his people wear around the house and he likes to refer to as his sexy pants (because they are anything but). I say a few minutes too long because I was working on my laptop in my office and I heard him squeak in alarm, just as the dog started barking because the neighbor came to the door (which, being more glass panes than wood framing, you can look straight through), catching Spouse in a pair of fire engine red underwear.

In yet another case of a good deed never going unpunished, it turns out the neighbor had come over to deliver some magazines put out by the publishing company he works for in Berlin– the most recent copies of the German version of Rolling Stone, a magazine devoted exclusively to heavy metal, and some other music magazine. I think this is a kindness done in return for the help I provided when his wife was injured and couldn’t look after the alpacas.

Anyway, oooh! I never buy magazines, but they are full of shiny pictures and I suppose I could be a good girl and buckle down and read the articles in German. The magazines also came with CDs and a tiny actual record. The record has something to do with the artist who, if I understand correctly, was once again the artist no longer merely formerly known as Prince by the time he died in 2016 (four years ago already!). But that will have to wait, since we have a refurbished record player and speakers but remain lacking the necessary amplifier to place between them to make the music sound like more than tin. So, on to the CDs.

The first one came with the Rolling Stone and is called something like their 154th edition of New Voices. Only the voices aren’t terribly new, seeing as how the CD starts with a song by Travis, a band that I first heard in the 1990s, a decade where I was already pretty far from hip to the current musical happenings.

So I turned to the CD attached to the metalhead magazine… a promotional CD from one of those dime a dozen and you’d still be rich because there are so many in Germany medieval metal bands that consists of nine or ten scruffy, leather kilt-wearing, Nordic-looking men. The titles alone are fabulous. Stuff like the German equivalent of “Middle Finger to the Future” and “Economic Growth Über Alles” plus a cover of a song lovingly entitled “We Drink Your Blood”.

The highlight of the CD, aside from the live track proving that they at least once placed Wacken, is the medley of We Will Rock You and Lady in Black played slightly off key with bagpipes and electric guitars and sung in harmony as if by pirates attacking a sea shanty. It ought to be fabulous, but…

Oh, wow, now I’m listening to the live track that proves they at least once played Wacken. It’s from the point of Prometheus, you know, they guy who brought fire to humankind, and it is all so very earnest.

Anyway, I guess this is one of their new songs that the promotional CD was meant to promote. I suspect I would like it a lot better (which it to say, at least a little bit) if, instead of a grumpy old woman, I was a 13-year old boy.