Tank Battles (The Songs Of Hanns Eisler)

Dagmar Krause takes the songs Hanns Eisler wrote in flight from fascism and sings them in both German and English, turning agitprop into something you can't shrug off.

Her voice is a strange instrument for this material — vibrato-heavy, precise, almost uncomfortably close to the microphone — and it makes "Lied von der Deutschen Mutter" land like an accusation rather than a lament. Eisler wrote these to argue, not to soothe, and Krause honors that by refusing to prettify the bitterness in "Der Graben" or the mock-cheer of the money songs. The bilingual approach matters: hearing "Zahlen müsst ihr" and its ideas twice forces you to sit with the politics instead of letting the melody carry you past them. What could have been a museum piece becomes a live wire, Brecht and Eisler's fury delivered by someone who clearly believes every word.