Iceage - Under The Sun (AZUMA MAKOTO FLORAL INSTALLATION "CRAZY GARDEN X ICEAGE") 2018 (sublime Danish post punk)

[Celerity]

Label: Escho – ESC95
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition
Country: Denmark
Released: 4 May 2018
Genre: Rock
Style: Post-Punk









https://archive.ph/Axo4n

On their astonishing fourth album, the Danish punk band reach for pop-gothic grandeur with more tenacity and abandon than ever.

Aren’t punks supposed to look at flowers and hate them? Not Iceage, it seems, who performed recently in Tokyo subsumed by flowers of every hue. Electric blue, royal red, magenta, periwinkle. Observing the Danish rock band in this breathtaking setting on Instagram, I imagined a funeral. The botanical barrage was, it turned out, an installation by the artist Makoto Azuma, famous for sending a bonsai into space. Maybe it was just supposed to look pretty. If so, this striking picture compounded beauty, softness, violence, ecstasy—not unlike Iceage’s new music. It felt like a commitment to the idea that we are not what you expect, of performed vulnerability, of embodying a question mark.

Iceage have spent a decade inching towards a twisted glamor: a sullen band fronted by a Draculian poet, constantly experimenting, carrying forth the clangoring drama of post-punk innovators such as Rowland S. Howard in The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls. Their guiding principles play out in their best songs: With “Ecstasy,” their expressiveness; with “The Lord’s Favorite,” unblinking humor; with “How Many,” romanticism. And even as their strengths converge upon this astonishing odyssey of a fourth album, Iceage remain a moving target still.

On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever. On the opener, “Hurrah,” Elias Rønnenfelt sings of “roaring free-jazz fireworks” as if to introduce the band’s lushest yet palette of sax, trombone, trumpet, piano, and violin, which they play with the pummeling dynamism of contemporary Swans. Beyondless sparkles like a champagne bottle smashed in slow motion. Rønnenfelt’s lyrics—which he says wrote while hidden away, late at night, in a tower—can be Biblical or Shakespearean or they can just coldly stare you in the eye. To think of this heightened style alongside the crude, vicious hardcore of their 2011 debut is inspiring. The whole sound of Beyondless, from pop hooks to hints of cabaret jazz, seems to be fantastically coated with cheap gold paint.

Rønnenfelt, now 26, has always been an actorly frontman—his voice can sound demonic, detached, drunk, sometimes all at once—but now with a more concrete grip on English, he’s fully in character, like Rimbaud born into the Addams family. He compares himself to a rat and talks to God. He sings ridiculous lines about the end of the world and STDs in his mouth. He longs for “arbitrary thrills” on the LP’s druggish “Catch It,” and on the oceanic title track, he is “perfectly lost at sea internally.” Seedy desperation is a recurring theme. Rønnenfelt wields his pen with a new level of rigor and conviction, and he makes phrases like “anesthetic laison” and “derisions of the flesh” and “wretched pantomime” roll off the tongue. When he wallows through a couplet like “As above, so below/These transgressions take me higher,” he narrates his debasement with such command that it clears the air, and charges every crevice of the song, like opera.

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