A stylishly ramshackle, brilliantly brash’n’breezy punk-shoegaze feral sixth studio LP, streamlining sounds from 50s rock’n’roll through to early 00s indie by the Copenhagen band fronted by Elias Rønnenfelt, successfully fulfilling their aim on this to be “immediate, urgent, raw and fast” across themes of romantic devotion with violent chaos and nihilism. Tenderness and threat combine (“I love you in an ominous way”) as Ember opens the album like a runaway train, followed by the sometimes galloping, sometimes stop-start of the dynamic mid-song shifts Match Head Girl, and recalls some of the scything energy of The Strokes. Later in the album Holy Water powerfully captures a philosophical-religious zeal form of destructive-creative violent love though visceral images: “Cut my anaesthesia/ The drip drilled in my vein / 'Cause it's just my luck, any drug that numbs/ Alerts another nerve to pain … I’m a bee and I’m jammed by my stinger in you / It is home, it is death.” Single The Weak is a huge crowd singalong loud handclap single with blues-chord 50s rock’n’roll, with added deliberately out-of-tune shambolic squealing recorder solo. Rønnenfelt has a particular skill at delivering a half-sung, half-spoken, half out-of-tune passionate delivery, almost never failing to be stirring and punch-the-air effective. Salve For Every Sore is a pacy, catchy, talky treatise on love and pain with scratching violin and guitars that feels like the Velvet Underground on speed. Musically No Fear has strong echoes of The Smiths as well as Dinosaur Jr., Star channels thumping bassline and jangly guitar early 90s baggy indie, Mother-of-Pearl has echoes of Iggy Pop and the guitar and drum rhythms of Lust For Life and follows a tawdry situation of heroin addiction, pregnancy and prison. Meanwhile 1835 has meaty and jangly guitar sound while stormy lyrics on the transience of life referencing Chile’s 1835 8.5-magnitude earthquake that triggered a tsunami near the cities of Concepción and Talcahuano: “That's what we'll all be / Washed away with history / A rupture and some fifty died / In eighteen-hundred-thirty-five.” Closer True Blue builds into a voluminous swirling fusion of shoegaze, country and punk and cites mental illness and thoughts of a rapture. Challenging at first listen but extra attention make this album addictively powerful, visceral, raw and vital, and one of their finest yet. Out on Mexican Summer.
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