Something is pretty awesome in the state of Denmark. This ham-fisted MacBeth reference is doubly pertinent for the city of Aalborg, the nation’s fourth largest city (after Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Odense) and, according to Professor Wikipedia, the one designated as “The Paris of the North.” There are a lot of other facts I could include about the city of more than 120,000, which has settlements dating back to around 700 AD and is currently in the midst of a transition from a working class industrial city to a knowledge-based one, but I’ll stick with the most important characteristic these days: it is home to pop quintet Oh No Ono.
The band, which has been steadily building critical and popular support in ever larger concentric zones emanating out from their homebase, has only recently started to take the American market by storm, but boy is the storm now brewing epic. Although the band’s new record, Eggs, just hit shelves (virtual and otherwise) this week, tracks and accompanying videos have been bouncing around ye olde internets for a while now, garnering the kind of healthy buzz that precedes mega-stardom (or at least an invitation to a timely and well-curated ATP stage somewhere in the developed world). Listeners and snooty bloggers alike are going ape over this record, and for good reason: it’s killer. The record is just familiar enough, harkening as much to fellow Scandinavian imports I’m From Barcelona and (especially) Peter, Bjorn, and John as it does to sprawling indie orchestras like Danielson and The Polyphonic Spree to generational debts paid to The Beatles and Aaron Copland, but doing so in a way that is arguably more experimental and psychedelic than any of the obvious influences one hears. Except, perhaps, the Rubber Soul/Sgt. Pepper era Fab Four.
The band’s sound shifts throughout the new record, and if one didn’t know better or wasn’t listening carefully, they might be likely to double down on the losing side of a wager concerning whether this is a Danish indie rock sampler, rather than the complex and genre-vexing contribution of a single group. Putting out a record where every song sounds so distinct is not only a difficult exercise, but a risky decision, as well. So often, similarly diverse albums by less inspired bands fall on their face, leaving listeners unsure of what a given band’s “real” sound is or leaving them inclined to relegate favorite tracks to the randomness of the iTunes shuffle (such as the hardly random algorithm that dominates that sequence is … don’t get me started) rather than dig – or even think seriously about – the album as a whole. Eggs avoids that trap, and does so because the ethos of joyful experimentation persists from track to track, linking the songs philosophically even as they differ on the sonics and aesthetics.
The record opens auspiciously, a few seconds of barely audible thunder before the choral melody hammer drops, followed by some quasi-Chinese orchestral strains before proto-Scandinavian vocals drop. In many ways, the track (“Eleanor Speaks”) reminds me of the last Taken By Trees album in its marriage of the region’s general pop sensibilities with a particular global impluse, though unlike that album, where Victoria Bergsman immersed herself in Pakistani culture, the boys in this band holed up on the little known Danish island of Mon for nine months in order to get deep within themselves.
The album continues in a different direction on “Swim,” arguably the record’s strongest track, with its combination of twee lyrics and a heavy chamber sound. Although the video for this song has received loads of much-deserved attention, I encourage readers to dig into the track itself a few times before watching the video. It’ll create two different and equally brilliant experiences if you do so.
http://www.vimeo.com/4664323Notable tracks populate the rest of the album, including “Icicles,” with its deranged male glee club tenor vocals over pompy instrumentals, the new-school, Rush-inspired cantata “The Wave Ballet,” the mermaidesque dynamics of the vocals on “The Tea Party,” and the Rentals meets 8-bit maestro vibe of “Internet Warrior.” The album’s first proper single, “Helplessly Young,” features an ascendant chorus and an odd Salt n Pepa instrumental underbelly pairing so irrefutable in its charm it isn’t surprising that the band released not one but three separate videos for the song. My favorite is posted below, but you can check out the other two here.
The trio of tracks that conclude Eggs are a particular riot. “Miss Miss Moss” alone could’ve gotten the band a contract with Sounds Familyre. As much as it channels latter-day Daniel Smith work, the sincerity of the guitar work calls to mind something more like jangly 60s radio rock with just a bit of Jimi in it. On “Miss Miss Moss” and the final two tracks, “Eve” and “Beelitz,” the band stretches things out a bit, with an average run time of about 7 minutes per. The changed pacing is particularly evident in “Eve,” with its languid tenor vocals caressing the narrative as if Vivien Leigh descending an antebellum staircase. There is no hurry here, ironic for a song concerned with time running out, and the deliberate clip is worth the extra couple of minutes, particularly with its hasty mid-track transition into something both more opulent and somehow more simple and its American folk symphonic culmination that begged my earlier Aaron Copland reference.
The album closes with the nearly ten minute “Beelitz,” a song as sprawling as its duration might suggest. Beginning with some speed-tracking tomfoolery, the jibberish soon gives way to church organs and a half-Enya, half-Duran Duran sequence that eventually shows off the percussive skill set of the team. By the 6th minute, however the atmospherics dissipate and the song becomes decidedly prettier and more melancholy.
With “Beelitz,”, Oh No Ono shows that even as its “hidden track” of slow-distorted human speech, following about 140 seconds of increasingly white noise, with the occasional solitary bow pull across a cello strings, is a throwback to bygone times and technology, the band is poised to bring America’s flag-swaddled shores something new, but with Eggs and beyond.
Eggs, the U.S. debut for Danish rockers Oh No Ono, dropped stateside yesterday via Friendly Fire Recordings. The top-notch Brooklyn label – which is also home to favorites like Asobi Seksu, The Phenomenal Handclap Band, and Windmill – released the record in North and South America; The Leaf Label is handling the release everywhere else (except the band’s home country). Although the rest of the country is currently out of luck, the band is in New York this week to play shows at Mercury Lounge tonight (with another Citizen Dick-approved band, Bear in Heaven) and Union Hall tomorrow, before returning to Europe to tour the old country.
