"I'm the worst thing that can happen to you... I'm just a glimmer of someday." The very first lines and bars of this album hint at what's to come: Das Paradies is a third-rate oasis of well-being, "Golden Future" clever feel-good music that plays with expectations and associations. Some may know Florian Sievers as one half of the pop duo Talking To Turtles. Under the stage name Das Paradies, Sievers writes and sings in his native language for the first time, and he does so with such impressive ease, as if he'd been doing it his whole life. Sievers' music is characterized by indie rock of the "world-renowned slacker" variety and sprinkled with subtle touches of reggae, dub, and deep house, creating a friendly, almost hippie-esque atmosphere. Sievers, a part-time hermit, crafts the word and sound world of Das Paradies in his Leipzig studio. A 20-square-meter trial-and-error space, just an hour's ride on the ICE train's dining car from the windowless but legendary Berlin unicorn studio of his friend and producer Simon Frontzek. As a connoisseur of time, his observations and the resulting phrases are always wonderfully refined. Once he's found the right word, he lets it go again. Pop as Zen meditation in a world where people are hardening their positions once more. "The universe doesn't even know what it's in the mood for. What looks like a yes could also be a no. What we all said wasn't really meant to be taken so seriously." An album that leaves us with these lines can be a liberation from paranoia, a plea for relaxation, or both.