Stylianos Ou und seine Combo Cortisol Cows bringen in einigen Tagen ihre erste gemeinsame LP “Fucked Forever” bei den auf Music for Adults spezialisierten Ever/Never Records heraus. Hinter dem Namen des Bandleaders verbirgt sich der in Griechenland bekannte Musiker, Künstler und Autor Stelios Papagrigoriou. Papagrigoriou, der hier neben Gesang und Rhythmusgitarre noch Klavier, Keyboard, Elektronik und Perkussion einsetzt, wird begleitet von den Cortisolkühen in Person von Marilú Theologiti (Cello, Backing Vocals), Leander Eilts (Schlagzeug), Kimonas Vlachakis (Bass, Leadgitarre, Percussion) und Giotis Paraskeuaidis (Banjo, Gitarre). Mit diesen Zutaten entsteht ein eingängiger, von oft an der Grenze zur Rezitation angesiedeltem Gesang und entspanntem Downtempo-Rhythmus gepräter Songwriter-Rock, der die vor Galgenhumor strotzenden Texte noch deutlicher hervorscheinen lässt. Das Album erscheint mit Papagrigorious eigenem Artwork und ist auch digital erhältlich.

“We’ re fucked forever, we truly are. When a tropical shit storm hits the mind then there’s nothing else to do but wait. The rain must fall. We learn to wait from an early age, and that is essential for our survival. Waiting for the song it’s also a form of patience that grows inside of a musical standing carcass. Sometimes it takes the form of disease, denial, mood swings, depression or any other form that in a certain period of time is required for the song to be born. I’ ve been waiting for the song. I did that for a long time. The waiting never ends. We wait for songs as we wait for trains in the night or people in our lives. These songs were living inside of me like bacteria and finally bloomed, with the help of wonderful friends and immersive fertilization. In this peculiar collection of songs the essential spark that made melodies crawl and come out under the stones like serpents in the grass, was a single moment in a friend’s small apartment in Athens, one afternoon, one single feeling from the past, while I had his guitar in my lap just to mess around between casual chat, cigarettes and coffee. In the end maybe it’s a little foolish to explain songs. Songs are meant to be sung or remembered or even forgotten for a while, but surely there is a need to excavate motivation behind a killing – and songs are the aftermath of a killing that needs to be explained. Songs are little people, just like us, flimsy and incomplete things that constantly breathe, change and mutate, memory depositories of shame, lust or joy, rotten wounds that vibrate, broken museums plundered by entropy and time sequences, open graves full of faces we used to know and loved, confessions of destructions and days passed unseen by our eyes like invisible animals that run over the hills. Songs work slowly and with no clear purpose, and for sure, even the most humble ones, are a great way to learn how to live, to learn how to die and maybe for some magical seconds, to see clearly and in all its glory, the blistering flame that consumes us constantly. We’ re fucked forever, we truly are”. (S.P.)