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Gentle, longing and sacred – that's how the new Dagobert album "Rama Kalala" sounds. On his eighth studio album, the Swiss pop innovator focuses on his core competency: the love song. And there is so much love on "Rama Kalala" that you find yourself blushing at times for all the honest feelings you are so touched by in these 34 minutes that they feel like a warm embrace. It all begins with the song "Hör auf dein Herz", a great pop song and immediate Dagobert classic, in which love remains as unheard as hope is immortal, without any kind of despair creeping in, because love is far too pure and hope is far too much the essence of life itself. It becomes spiritual again and again, so too in the next song "Das innere Licht", in which Dagobert sings of a telepathic connection that could not be more touching. "I see how you shine / I see you / I see the inner light / I stand in your love / It fulfills me / It is the inner light". Once again Dagobert surprises us with ethnological influences too, because he has consistently developed his sound for years and gives his listeners always much more than what is expected. So too in his home song "Komm zu mir in die Berge", which loosens up the album's pensive sentimentality a bit. "Lady Kalala" is then the first English-language Dagobert song ever, which features a charming indie beat and a magnificent saxophone solo from Swiss jazz legend Christoph Gallio and despite its sad lyrics comes with a breezy lightness that is very much fun. "Rama Kalala" is the fifth collaboration with producer Konrad Betcher, who stages Dagobert's songs here mostly intimately and reduced. The influence of Alice Coltrane's Hindu late work is present in the form of spherical synths, mantra-like choirs and the reduction of rhythm elements to tambourine and hand claps and also explains the album title. Overall, "Rama Kalala" is suffused with a sympathetic Lo-Fi-Indie sound that beautifully conveys the emotionality of Dagobert's lyrics. A love song of the particularly striking kind Dagobert dedicates to his demented mother and finds even in this situation words that act like a balm for the soul: "You have overcome reason / And no longer need language / You have found love / Your stream now flows into the sea".