THEES UHLMANN – „Sincerely, Thees Uhlmann. Das Beste von Tomte bis heute“

In the organizer's words:

Highway, dirt tracks, country roads. Thees Uhlmann has long been his own road movie. But only this album traces the trip in a way that is suitable for traveling. It takes you from the AJZ to the stadium, from Hemmoor to New York, through more than three decades of reunited Germany. Rock, indie, punk and everything else. But only in extreme emergencies.

"This is not the sun going down /

This is the earth that turns"

("Beauty of Opportunity")

The Tomte Years (1994 - 2010)

In a small studio apartment in Cologne. Band members of the group Tomte have gathered on mousy gray carpet tiles. Adrenaline, restlessness, alcohol. It's the dead of night, sometime around the turn of the millennium, one of them is waving a construction site light around, another has apparently stolen rags and sponges from the cleaning trolley that was parked around the corner from the supermarket. Oh, God! The fucking neighbors are guaranteed to have seen that. Thees Uhlmann has to call these borderless people to order, I think. After all, he's their supervisor, and I'd flippantly promised him that if things got tight, "someone could crash at my place". But nobody looks tired here - and Thees doesn't look like he's interested in stopping the madness either, rather the opposite.

The story of "Sincerely, Thees Uhlmann" and Tomte starts earlier anyway. However, if you don't want to travel to their first demo cassette in the old youth cellar, it takes you back to Cologne. Thees himself lived there for a while. "In Cologne and then in my room" is the earliest track in this collection. It appeared on Tomte's very first vinyl single "Blinkmuffel" and sounds like simply kicking himself down the slope with his friends - the rest will come. One minute forty is enough for such an urgent song, it doesn't get any greener than that.

In any case, the early pieces already contain much of what defines Thees' songwriting: wit and conciseness, exuberance and melancholy. And a regional connection that will never be broken over the decades, the ominous Hemmoor: "You think you're just behind New York / But Hemmoor is cooler than you / At least you know where you stand".