Marcel Winatschek

Amanda Blank Won’t Be Contained

The lineup for the Levi’s Berlin Unbuttoned show at Astra Kulturhaus that summer was genuinely good, which is the most you can say about a brand-sponsored concert: that the music overcomes the context. The Subways were tight and loud in that way young British rock bands are before they start sounding like themselves. Crookers I barely knew. Amanda Blank I very much wanted to see.

Amanda Blank was operating somewhere between rap and electro-pop and raw sexual provocation, all of it delivered with a confidence that read as completely natural rather than performed. Her record I Love You came out around then—the kind of thing that sounds like it was made by someone who doesn’t care what genre it belongs to, which is almost always a good sign. She’d been running with the Spank Rock crowd, which told you everything about the temperature she was working at.

There’s a specific pleasure in stumbling into a show like that—nominally corporate, slapped with a brand name, and finding that the music is doing whatever it wants regardless. The jeans are just jeans. Amanda Blank is still Amanda Blank.