After a spate of
PR-initiated downloadings and listenings of various creative merit,
an unmitigated week of busyness, and not a lot of sleep at all, Dråpe
represented the clean slate I unknowingly needed. After one listen
of the band’s single ‘Round and Around’, the bad had been
washed away and replaced with Scandinavian shoegaze. 'Relax/Relapse' is the first album of Ketil Myhre, Eirik Kirkemyr, Eirik Fidjeland,
Lars Kristian Boquist and Even Hafnor, and stands as a strong marker
for the incredible music coming out of the scene that rarely makes it
over to this side of the North Sea. The album is bookended by the
titular ‘Relax’ and ‘Relapse’, the former being an
instrumental piece of little more than one minute, a perfect vignette
of the album’s typical sound.
The first song proper
is ‘Replica’ – a poppy, upbeat affair with ulterior motives.
It draws you in with promise of '60s-throwback guitar riffs and
familiar trem/whammy sounds from surf and Tame Impala, only to pin
you there with something wholly different: a plaintive, heart-melting
vocal delivery that not only turns the warbled backline on its head
but informs exactly how this album will make you feel from now on. Following track ‘?’
plays more with this dichotomy, as Doors organs interplay with
Fishing For Crabs falsetto and the now-typical Dråpe guitar sound –
apparently achieved in part by the leaving of instruments out in the
cold to shrink the wood and alter the tuning slightly.
‘Pie In The Sky’
introduces some drum-driven urgency, with trebled synths,
well-disguised guitars and a refreshingly unique, clear bass sound
co-mingling for something that could well have been a Weird
Fishes/Arpeggi B-side. It surges forward like a burst-bank river
taking your house in its entirety: everything is there, defined, and
static around you, but you still feel like you and everything are
going very very fast, very very loudly. Middle track ‘There
Is A House’ is of my favourites on ‘Relax/Relapse’ – after one and a half minutes of what seems like the song’s bread and butter,
the band drop into a near-apocalyptic groove that bears little
structural relation, and stay there until the song’s end four minutes
later. In these four minutes, lead guitars shimmer with 3-bar
high-octave chords while bass bounds around the fundaments of the
environment and organs, white noise and epistemic delay fiddlings
make up the sea-froth of a tidal wave to ‘Pie In The Sky’s river.
This is one of those songs of which it’s a shame to reach the end.
‘My Friend The
Scientist’ boasts sublime harmonies and suitably fragile
surrounding sounds, where ‘And You Change Your Mind’ brings back
a familiar sensation, with fervent drum grooves driving endless
guitar melody, percussive bass, cirric singing, and your house yet
further downstream. ‘Relapse’ closes out the album with
intermittently frail-the-strong instrumentation, repeated lyric
phrases and cymbal-crashes backswashing the debris from your roof.
No comments:
Post a Comment