Unter der Haut was the first album
City released with their new lineup, which included keyboarder Manfred Hennig. With Georgi Gogow gone, who had contributed many musical ideas, the band had to find a new identity, and they did so by heavily relying on Hennig's keyboards. The sound was far more computerized, and all this electronic gobbledygook did not hide the main problem: weak compositions and on the lyrical side, too much pretension. Where
City had once just plainly rocked and told stories about simple people (one song of the album, "Unser Schuldirektor," still does that), they now reached out for the big topics -- the absolute low point of the album is a terrible German synthesizer-loaded version of
Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with the German title "Sag Mir, Wo Die Blumen Sind"), apart from a boring criticism of Hollywood's dream factory ("Zuckersüß"). ~ Frank Eisenhuth