INTERVIEW: Iceage (Clash)

"During our telephone call, I ask Surrballe Wieth if he’s pleased with You’re Nothing. “Oh yeah - very, very pleased with it,” he replies with genuine enthusiasm before going on. “But I think it seems like we did it quite a long time ago now. I think we’re already in a new place, we’re already writing a lot of new songs. We feel really great about how it turned out, it turned out exactly how it should, but we’re just moving on constantly.”"

I spoke to Iceage guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth for this feature for Clash in the run up to the band's excellent second album You're Nothing. Read it here.

January Playlist (Volume 1)

Welcome to the first of a (roughly) fortnightly series of playlists. I've decided to do this because I wanted a record of what I've been listening to, that way I can return to each list and remind me what I was excited about months earlier. Also, some music just deserves sharing.

Most songs will be new, some might be old. Some will be quiet, some will be very loud. It will all be good though, trust me. This first one is a strong list, featuring everything from metal to classically infused techno from as far and wide as Germany and Denmark, Norway and Northen Ireland.

Edit: The Marnie Stern track for some reason won't work on the Cloud Player. Here it is.

 

The Tracks:

 

Thought Forms - Only Hollow

This is an immediately striking track from Thought Forms, who are signed to Geoff Barrow's Invada Records. Taut, fraught and fuzz-drenched.

The Men - Electric

Open Your Heart was bursting with honest intent, and reviews rewarded that, yet the album was inexplicably shunned by Album of the Year polls at the end of 2012. They deserve better in 2013. Third album New Moon arrives in March, and they'll be in the UK shortly after.

Iceage - Coalition

Iceage are back and this is great news. This track is as furious as you might expect from the Danes, but also hints at the new emotional depths plumbed on second album You're Nothing.

John Grant - Pale Green Ghosts

Haunting, shapeshifting slowburner from the ex-The Czars man. No matter what else I listen to, I keep coming back to this one.

Marnie Stern - Year of the Glad

Another welcome return, this time from Marnie Stern. This track and another early arrival, 'East Side Glory', suggest that on phenomenally titled new album The Chronicles of Marnia, Stern has reined in the hyperactive guitar wizardry just slightly, allowing her songwriting to shine through even more than on previous releases.

No Spill Blood - Good Company

Along with Okkultokrati's Snakereigns (below), No Spill Blood's Street Meat EP was one of my heavy discoveries of 2012. Another smart signing from the usually excellent Sargent House, the Northern Ireland hardcore band combine synth hooks with the power of Mastodon and the intensity of Converge. A forthcoming debut album is well worth looking out for.

 

Okkultokrati - No Ourouboros

Owing as much to 80's US hardcore as it does to much of the metal produced closer to home (the band are from Norway), Okkultokrati's Snakereigns LP is a snarling, sneering hybrid.

Brandt Brauer Frick - Broken Pieces Feat. Jamie Lidell
The first new music from the German Techno/Classical group since 2011's Mr Machine, this comes from their new album Miami, released in March. BBF arrive in the UK in late March, performing with Frank Ocean producer and Miami guest star Om'Mas Keith.

See also: Nina Kraviz and Theo Parrish.

Iceage are back!

Completely overshadowing some or other news announcement from a man named David this morning, Iceage have announced a vast array of tour dates accross the UK and Europe. As well as this, they are also streaming a new track, 'Coalition', from their forthcoming album 'You're Nothing', which I will be reviewing for Lineofbestfit.com soon and which, judging by the songs they played when I saw them in Brighton in November, is going to show a very pleasing progression from the Danes. 'Coalition', certainly, is ace, or life-affirming, or fierce, or something like that.

Take that Mr Bowie!

Listen to 'Coalition' here.

(Image from Iceage's blog)

Mild Horses: Alternative Music’s Passion Problem

In my local town centre, a withered old man in a yellow raincoat sits on a fold-up chair outside Sports Direct. Hunched over a sequin-encrusted mandolin hooked up to a tiny amplifier, he plays improvised, scratchy blues with the amp’s overdrive turned to max. His eyes remain closed and his only visible movements are the slight shifts of his fingers. He meanders through dead notes and dissonance for hours at a time, oblivious to the stares and giggles of Saturday shoppers and hip teens. He is the antithesis to every mistake made in guitar music’s grim last few years.

A combination of uninspired songwriting and an increased focus on synth-fuelled pop and alternative music has left the idea of using a guitar to change the world looking decidedly uncool. However, it is not the instrument itself that is to blame, far from it in fact. The problem lies in motivation. In the rough-around-the-edges Nirvana film “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!”, Kurt Cobain describes what he sees as the essential for good rock music. “As long as it’s good, and has passion”, Cobain says, then it is worthy.

The Nirvana frontman’s viewpoint may seem characteristically simplistic, but his point highlights exactly the sort of vitality that is lacking from far too much of today’s alternative music. Music should be about more than just haircuts and denim. The songs should be life-affirming, they should inspire us to create something in turn - whether it be more great music or just a loud, drunken howl of wild appreciation.

The problem is that passion suffers an image problem. Picking up a guitar to nervous silence for the climax of gigs on his last tour, comedian Stewart Lee bemoaned the fact that “People find nothing more embarrassing than the sight of someone trying to do something sincerely and well”. Image is everything, and  passion seems dangerously unselfconscious. There are lots of decent  electronic artists pushing the envelope at the moment - far more than there are good guitar bands. But sometimes electronica can be stark, clinical and calculated; it can register the disconnection between music and creator, and possibly – dare I say it - between product and passion.

Of course, many of those brandishing guitars are partly to blame. For every decent act there are 1000 indie bands united only by haircuts and a lack of soul. It is music dictated by the adverts in fashion magazines, when it should be the other way around. To some extent our heroes make us who we are. Our adoration moves us to try and emulate them. Now, no one wants legions of Nirvana copyists out there - we tried that 20 years ago and it was rubbish - but absorbing the spirit of our heroes can drive us to do incredible things. But what if our heroes are nothing more than the limp, tweed-clad ‘discoveries’ of increasingly nervous record labels. Who wants heroes like that? Does anyone really want to worship Mumford and Sons?

There are bands around that get this.

Titus Andronicus’ 2010 album The Monitor is a concept album based on the US Civil War ship of the same name. Try telling me that sounds cool. The thing is, the songs on The Monitor bleed and screech passion. The vocals don’t always hit the notes they aim for; guitars drown in their own feedback. There are saxophone solos, bagpipes; long spoken word samples interrupt the songs. The album is too long - the last track alone clocks in at over 14 minutes. And all of this makes The Monitor the album that it is: a raucous, defiant, and at times beautiful listen.

The Men are another band revelling in the possibilities of six strings, as demonstrated on 2012’s Open Your Heart - the title of which alone serves as an apt rallying call to the alternative music community. They are not afraid of loudness, neither are they afraid of placing 7 minute Sonic Youth-country-rock instrumentals alongside black metal freakouts. They have been dubbed Thurston Moore and the E-Street Band, and while the crossover between fans of the Sonic Youth guitarist and those of The Boss may not be notable, the combination of genre-busting experimentalism and all-comers-welcomed blue collar rock suggested by the nickname is not far wide of the mark. In the hands of bands like these the rock template is left twisted and broken – a testimony to the impulses and flaws of a truly honest group of musicians.

There are plenty of other honourable mentions. No Age are three albums into a nicely developing career championing free-spirited and increasingly mature silliness; young bands like Iceage and embryonic Londoners Savages are displaying an adeptness for fuzz and urgency; Black Keys have been plying their trade admirably for some time and their apparent storming of the mainstream could well position them as the Pied Pipers that lead the scenesters back into that dark, damp pit where rock’s true soul lurks.

Good things are happening.

Cathy Pellow, the head of LA-based label Sargent House - who themselves boast an admirable roster of up and coming young rock acts - tweeted recently “Is it just me or are the hipster blogs and magazines finally giving heavy music some props?” It isn’t Pellow’s imagination, nor is it just heavy music. There are deeper rumbles in alternative music’s undernourished belly, a rediscovered longing for some substance, for some meat to devour. And while that repast may not come in the form of a wizened space-blues mandolinist from Truro (though I for one don’t see why not), his is exactly the sort of uncompromising passion and off-kilter obliviousness that today’s acts must have if they are to whet the appetites of discerning music fans.