ICEAGE - New Brigade

A very young Danish ensemble, four rebels without a cause with the air of hooligans, Iceage (written as one word) are part of a recent Copenhagen scene dubbed "New Way Of Danish Fuck You" (sic!). Still relatively unknown to the general public, they've already attracted plenty of attention online. Word of mouth has been strong enough that the first pressing of their debut "New Brigade" sold out, and the band has had the chance to play a string of dates across Europe and the United States (it also seems Matador Records has already got its eye on them, which could be the prelude to a full-scale "launch"). But let's get back to "New Brigade".

A short ambient/noise fragment introduces us to "White Rune", a track that immediately gives a clear idea of the album's stylistic direction, with its lopsided post-punk incipit and the chaos generated by the guitars. An apathetic, hypnotic voice and the catchy rhythms dictated by the throbbing bass complete a sound that's hard to stay indifferent to, given how immediate and energetic it is; the track echoes early Killing Joke, but in a decidedly bastardized and sped-up key.

"New Brigade", a song for which a hallucinatory video was also shot, immediately establishes itself as a bizarre yet spot-on hybrid of punk and extreme (Nordic-style) metal, customized with distant yet powerful vocals that dominate two minutes of essential rock; a track that, like the previous one, proves very compelling from the very first listen.

On tracks like "Remember" and "Total Drench", Joy Division/Warsaw are reinterpreted through a hardcore fury, giving life to two excellent, scarred post-punk episodes; "Rotting Heights" starts out as a tribute to the Bauhaus of "In The Flat Field" but quickly mutates into another outburst of barely a minute and a half, blisteringly fast and repeatedly broken up by the band's trademark stop and go.

"Broken Bone" boasts a highly peculiar structure, with no wave touches put to the service of catchy choruses, much as happens in the following "Collapse" and in the furious "Eyes", confirming how these various reference points are transcended to create something new and extremely direct.

The closest parallels with hardcore punk can be found in "Count Me In", which barely clears the one-minute mark, while "Never Return" is, by contrast, the "longest" track, with its three minutes of syncopated sounds and the singer intoning over an obsessive, graceless backdrop, a veritable punk loop. The influence of Crisis emerges, and in the closing "You're Blessed" the band speeds up and decontextualizes its own forebears without ever neglecting the spot-on, misleading melodies that run through the scant twenty-five minutes of "New Brigade". Twenty-five minutes of genius and recklessness in which these newcomers manage to produce a surprising example of postmodern punk, steeped in a pronounced dark feeling.

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28/06/2011