I'm obsessed with this obscure German emo album
[07-06-2026]
One of my favourite albums is Medusaflöße zu Pflugscharen by German emo band d.h. I only learned about it when I saw it pop up on ebay search results, because someone put another band I was looking for into the title, "for fans of: ...". The album art immediately caught my attention, not only cause of the remarkably nondescript band name and the high brow, impenetrable title, but also cause the album art perfectly fits into the mold for the style of music I was looking for, but executed so well on all these familiar tropes that the album immediately had an air of being the pinnacle, the final boss of cryptic German emo.
To give a primer on the German punk scene, I think the most representative style of the scene in this country is not the pop-adjacent fun-punk that's represented by the likes of Die Ärzte and Die Toten Hosen, but is instead much darker and post-punky. None of these bands really ever made any moves in the mainstream, but the scene for this style is gigantic, flourishing, and just barely under the surface. The roots for this can probably be traced back to EA80, but is nowadays most well-known through bands like muff potter., Pascow and Turbostaat. This style is characterized by strong influences from post-punk, indie and 90s emo, a dark tone, a driving, engine-like rhythm section, shimmery, atmospheric guitar playing, scruffy production and down-to-earth, yet emotional and passionate performances. The lyricism tends to be very indirect, almost impressionistic, and often also full of poetic wordplay with old figures of speech, particularly Turbostaat, whose language is full of idioms and references from their native Husum near the Danish border.
The band name d.h. is, obviously, very hard to google. This makes them once again a perfect fit the German emo scene, which is littered with short, barely recognizable syllable snippets: Leto, Lygo, NO°RD, Fjørt, all real bands. Despite their ungooglable name and their relative obscurity, they have left a bit of a traceable paper trail behind. There is a small handful of interviews and reviews in music magazines such as the Ox Fanzine, entries on discogs and a brief, but helpful wiki page on the Parocktikum Wiki, a wiki specifically for documenting the East German punk scene. d.h. have existed from 1997 to 2009 and were from Zeitz, a town in the East German state of Sachsen-Anhalt, about 50 kilometers away from Leipzig, that they would later relocate to. To make matters more confusing, Leipzig seemed to already have a hardcore band called D.H. that existed roughly at the same time as our d.h., but that, luckily for me, seemed to have left even less of a paper trail than the d.h. I'm looking for. They have released three albums, all on the now defunct Matatu Records, Medusaflöße zu Pflugscharen being their final one. On the CD packaging it lists a number of different links to record labels, "networks" they're part of, their own website ("holzhose.de", translated: wooden pants). All of these links are dead now. At time of writing it is still possible to get your hand on physical copies of their albums though, as they've seemingly been kept in stock by the indie label that took over the Matatu Records catalogue, fittingly called Major Label, for a bit after the dissolution of the band and their original label.
This album is, of course, not on streaming, but you can click here to get to my YouTube upload of it.
Enough background information, let's get to the music. If I wanna do a quick "for fans of: " for people who aren't familiar with any of the German scene, I would say that if you like scruffy 90s emo like Jawbreaker and Cap'n Jazz, or earlier alternative trailblazers like Fugazi or Hüsker Dü, you'll probably like d.h. The first moments of music you can hear from the album immediately gives you a great introduction to the mood and dynamics that are at play here. A gentle acoustic guitar, a wistful, distant vocal line, immediately crushed by loud, menacing guitars, at first just in individual attacks, but quickly building up to a pummeling punk beat, before the song reintroduces melody and strips back the volume. The sound of the album is free-flowing and progressive, not too concerned with traditional song structures, choruses or hooks. Simultaneously though, all the sharp turns the songs take feel like the natural next move, the melodies are immediately catchy and the two singers harmonize and effortlessly trade lines back and forth. The production is fantastic, hitting the perfect balance between sounding just rough enough to leave an authentic edge, but being so clear that you hear everything, and completely mastering the loud-quiet-dynamic, the intense-to-gentle, the crushing-to-dreamy. While musically we're mostly in the realm of punk rock here, they occasionally pull out seriously out of the box drum beats or heavy, metallic guitar riffs. The performances are strong and emotional, reaching from a flat, disaffected tone all the way into desperate screams. The second to last track Wunschpunsch! Alter! Wunschpunsch! starts with a slow, menacingly droning string arrangement and washed out, distant vocals, and eventually builds itself up to tense repeated, tense screams of the title for the end. They make use of quite a lot of spoken-word passages and samples. The second song Jammerdise for example opens with an extended sample from the German dub of the 1972 Soviet sci-fi film Solaris (which I have not seen), but also integrates the spoken-word into the structure of the song with an extended stripped back bridge that create a feeling of thoughts haunting and coming in and out of your mind, before the song amps up the intensity again. In general, I love this album's ability to build up and release tension, to really make you feel the emotion of the performances.
So what is all of this about, then? Well, truth be told, I don't really know. Frankly, even the title leaves me stumped. Translated to "Medusa rafts into ploughshares", from what I can tell it's referring to The Raft of the Medusa, a post-shipwreck survival story involving starvation, dehydration and cannibalism, and the biblical partial quote "swords into ploughshares", which serves as idiom for repurposing tools of war for civilian survival. So the way I read this is that it's describing the ability to build a future out of a desperate situation. Beautiful, poetic and evocative, but I had to look all of this up, so I don't expect I can actually figure out what all of these lyrics mean. But I don't think knowing what everything means exactly really matters. I mentioned earlier that this flavour of German punk has the tendency to write impenetrable and impressionistic lyrics, but the fact that I don't understand what it means doesn't take anything away from it. In fact, I'd argue it's the opposite. I always feel very attracted to lyricism that I can only partially make out, only get a sense of the vibe, always feel like it's just out of reach from actually understanding. There is a fascination to things that are beyond me, and also, an opportunity to learn. And if you can package that in a way that you can still evoke all the right emotions, give me just enough snippets of understanding to piece something together, then I'm all in. I love that shit. Ultimately, what is important to me is less that I understand it, but that I can feel that it's real to the artist. Whatever odd turn of phrase or reference comes up, I want to feel like it means something to the person that wrote it, some life experience, some association, that they relate to. I don't need to be part of everything, sometimes it feels more authentic when I'm not.
My interpretation of the album's title matches the themes I can pick out from the lyrics. The album deals a lot in images of dreams and desperation. A spoken word section in the song Weltumarmen II ("Worldembracing II") mentions mundane dreams of simple labour, Independence Day of Drinne Sein ("Independence Day of Being Inside") contrasts images of parachutes and collapsing bridges with a description of buying a house and going inside, but "not just into the house". Dem Hund sein Schwein, a title referring to a German idiom of the "inner swine-hound", describing the weaker, inner self that makes one susceptive to inaction, vices and comfort, warns you "not do die in the waiting room of life" and gets at the sense of the vague sticks and even vaguer carrots that push us forward:
| German original | English translation |
|---|---|
| Weißt du wofür Moderne steht? | Do you know what modernity stands for? |
| Dass da was geht | That something's possible |
| Wir haben nichts und nichts zu verlieren | We have nothing and nothing to lose |
| Außer dieses schwammige Gebilde | Except for this nebulous construct |
| Diese Idee, diesen Funken, diese Glut | This idea, these sparks, this ember |
| Weitermachen, loslegen oder eben tot sein | Go on, get started, or just be dead |
Some titles, like the aforementioned Wunschpunsch! Alter! Wunschpunsch!, I don't even dare to try translate, because I have no idea what that words mean beyond its obvious individual word segments. Googling "Wunschpunsch", the result I get is Michael Ende's children's book Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch, or the English title The Night of Wishes: Or the Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion, which leads me to translate the song title as "Notion Potion! Man! Notion Potion!" But I haven't read that book and I have no idea what the fuck that means or why he screams it so aggressively. Another title that I can't really make out is my favourite track Jammerdise ("jammern" is to moan, to whine, but I have no clue what kind of word combination "-dise" is supposed to be), although it contains what to me sounds like possibly the central statement of the album:
| German original | English translation |
|---|---|
| We turn this Jammertal into Paradise | We turn this wailing valley into paradise |
| Dann bauen wir unser eigenes Solaris | Then we build our own Solaris |
| Die Materialisierung unserer Vorstellungen | The materialization of our own imaginations |
| Irgendwo in Meck Pomm, irgendwo am See | Somewhere in Meck Pomm, somewhere by the lake |
| Von jetzt auf gleich alles ändern | Change everything at a moment's notice |
| Ein Floß und mit letzter Kraft | A raft, and with a final push |
| Gegen den eigenen Willen am Leben geblieben | Staying alive against one's own will |
All that I can say is that I love this album and I would highly encourage anyone whose into 90s emo music and post-hardcore to check it out. If you don't speak German, I don't think this is too big of an issue, as I barely understand anything either and the emotional delivery underlined by the composition is in my eyes powerful enough to get the right impression. I hope that perhaps me pointing out and translating a couple of bits and pieces could at least give you enough tangible information to give you an idea of what this album deals with.
I mentioned at the beginning that I found this album as a CD on ebay, and that this is the last out of three albums the band has released. The first two albums, Kurze Hose, Holzgewehr!!! and Der Mann der barfuss Funken schlug, with equally strikingly inpenetrable titles as Medusaflöße, I was not able to get my hands on for the life of me. It is possible to find vinyl copies floating around, but I no longer want to buy vinyl and I don't have the ability to play, let alone digitize it, either. I searched far and wide for a way to be able to listen to these albums, but beyond the YouTube channel of Puvo Productions, the graphic designer and illustrator who created the album's artwork and layout, and uploaded two animated videos in horrible audio quality, it was of no avail. One was the Medusaflöße song Nicht die Welt sondern mich and the one, to me, new song Blockhäuserblocks, that's about all I could find. From the Ox Fanzine interview I found out that the band prefers the vinyl format, to give space to the meticulously designed artwork and presentation they release the albums with (see the image gallery below for the full Medusaflöße artwork). But it was also said that the second album, Der Mann der barfuss Funken schlug, was pressed on CDs and sold exclusively at live shows. Only that, beyond this interview, I can't find any proof of that. Neither Discogs nor its German counterpart musik-sammler.de have this version listed. In my desperation, my Medusaflöße that I took to Pflugscharen, so to say, I went to last.fm, and DMd the person who was listed as the band's top listener and asked if they had digital copies of the albums, and against all expectations, I actually ended up getting my hands on very low quality rips of the first two albums. This I am of course extremely grateful for. That being said, I'm lucky that Medusaflöße was the one album I was able to get on my own, because it's by far the best one they've done. The first two albums are good, a lot more straightforward, but on the second, you start to get the progginess and the theatrics creeping in more and more. This album has two songs I consider highlights of the band's discography, the intensely thrashy Runkelrüben and the aforementioned dramatic Blockhäuserblocks that escalates into a wonderfully intense breakdown. The low quality of the rips I have is a hinderance though, and I still regularly search for the album on ebay in the hope that maybe one day, one of those elusive CD copies that supposedly exist is listed.
I would really wish for these albums to get the chance to find a proper audience. The members of d.h. went on to play with different bands, but never reunited. I hope there's an effort some time in the future by whoever has the tapes for these albums to make them available again. Not only do I think this is this some of the strongest the German punk scene has to offer, it is quite possibly even my favourite emo album in general. People deserve to hear this, and the band deserves to be acknowledged for how good they are.
Finally, because I know the band talked so much about how important artwork and presentation were, here is the full album artwork, painstakingly digitized by me, despite not having the technical equipment for it:
