Listen: https://youtu.be/3w_bv3hiqRs (And here’s a live version that’s just as good: https://youtu.be/9DyFna0BamI)

A few weeks ago, I put on a random album from my backlog as background music for surfing the web. “Haha Sound” by Broadcast proved to be a surprisingly personable companion to my wanderings around the sticky Web.

Since I didn’t pay much attention to the album while it was playing, no track stood out in particular. However, on my second listen, the song “Minim” caught my attention, as its last part seemed to have a distinct, characteristically sweet German sound to it.

After verifying on the Internet, I found out that my intuition was indeed correct.

The way the singer murmurs the German line, with such tranquillity, really draws the attention to the sound of the words, and, more generally, to such an overlooked aspect as the beauty of languages.

‘Mellifluous’ is typically not the first word that comes to mind when describing the sound of German, yet here the words are flowing so smoothly that each word seems to call for the next one.

Simply put, the passage gave me some sort of epiphany, not least thanks to Trish Keenan’s pristine and exquisite voice, masterful in all registers.

My revelation could be summarized as such: language, in and of itself, is music.

This idea reminded me of polyglot Susanna Zaraysky’s claim that each language had its own personality. I was starting to understand.

The five deal-changing words for me were “Menschen und Wind ändern geschwind”, that is, “People and wind change rapidly”.

At this point, I could go out on a limb and argue that the “sch” sound (pronounced “sh”) in “Menschen” and “geschwind” allude to the whooshing of wind, but as you know, that’s really not my type.

Nevertheless, I’ve noticed just now that there’s some sort of parallel structure going on in the lyrics, with the grammatical stress falling on the first and last syllable on both lines (“MENschen und WIND / ÄNdern geSCHWIND”), and identical syllables being at the same position in both lines (“mENschEN und WIND / ÄNdERN geschWIND”).

Hence, there could be more poetry involved here than I initially thought.

This takes nothing from the granular beauty of the words and their sound, though, and I’m glad that “Minim” made me aware of it.

This being said, I’m still baffled as to why they chose to sing that one verse in German — not that I am going to complain.

Considering the effect it has had on me, it could simply be for euphony.

Or — and this theory is a wee bit farther-fetched — perhaps they tried to use the precision of German language to better convey their message, albeit at the expense of alienating the majority of their listeners. Indeed, in German, we use the reflexive form “sich ändern” to mean that something changes, and the simple form “ändern” to mean that something changes something else.

In the lyrics, the simple form “ändern” is used — though without a grammatical object.

I can sense your excitement.

Rather than people and wind changing quickly, could it be that people and wind change other things quickly?

Now brace yourself for the epic conclusion: just yesterday, I asked for a native’s opinion on the subject.

And guess what? He told me that the reflexive pronoun “sich” wouldn’t have fit in the lyrics, yet that it’s implied, and that there was nothing more to it.

Why do people always need to be killjoys?

Well, this made me cling even tighter to another theory of mine – that one far more plausible.

After listening to the song a couple of times while reading along to the lyrics, I finally made the connection between the first line, “how sweet the bells”, and the sounds being played in the back, seemingly at random, during the first half of the track. They are of course meant to imitate the chiming of bells, what with the volume dynamics and their going out of phase with one another. A highly creative and convincing effort.

(Speaking of which, it felt a bit surreal when bells in our village began to sound at the exact moment I started playing the song the other day.)

As for the contents of the lyrics, Trish Keenan seems to sing about the transience of human life, a sinister and foreboding topic when we know she was driven to an early grave at age 42 in 2011, after catching virus H1N1 while touring Australia with the band.

In a way, “Minim” celebrates both language as music (German as being melodic) and music as language (instrumentation conforming to the lyrics). This endeavour only adds more charm to an already outstanding track.

Addendum: I’ve just had a similar experience with English while listening to their song “Papercuts”. Trish’s voice and accent play a crucial role here. More generally, I’ve become a huge fan of the band since I wrote this article, with over 150 listens in two weeks. Each one of their songs is unique in its own way and inspires me enough to write about it. My latest favourite is the haunting “Echo’s Answer”, in which the ending of each verse marks a step further towards the inexorable ending. Just like most of their songs (and most songs in general, for that matter), it’s easy to take note of subtleties if you pay close enough attention. For instance, at the beginning of “Echo’s Answer”, I really like the fact that the sample lasts a little bit longer each time before it repeats.

You might be interested in an article I wrote about my love for German language; and on a track-by-track, vocal appreciation of Tomorrow’s World self-titled album and its delightful vocals.