by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Iceage has always been the most Scandinavian of punks. Cold and detached, scabrous and insouciant. These five Danish pillagers, their brooding faces betraying nothing, their colossal sound battering and bruising as it forged its nihilistic path. Their fifth studio album, Seek Shelter, arrives ten years after their first, the band entering a new dawn, a new decade. This record may not present the brightest of new dawns, necessarily, but slivers of light and hope emerge through their ubiquitous punishing darkness.
The band relocated to the studio of Spacemen 3’s Pete Kember in Portugal to record Seek Shelter but his effect on proceedings is minimal and fair, not curtailing their cataclysmic and catastrophic rock too much. “High & Hurt” and “Vendetta” are when Kember’s touch is at its clearest, both very slightly psychedelic. The band’s leader Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is enigmatic as always, whether emanating a cocky attitude in “High & Hurt” or sneering indifference in “Vendetta,” the latter being about the causes and consequences of crime.
Iceage have been expanding ever since their debut, pulling further away from straight punk, becoming increasingly accessible, and their rock influences are crystallized here. Much of it sounds like the most anthemic tracks from the Britpop period; some of the production seems to be aiming for the freewheeling and ecstatic atmosphere of Screamadelica. The buoyant and boozy melody of “Drink Rain” is surprising, like something The Pogues would have brandished. They know as always how to broodingly journey to a shattering chorus, such as in “The Wider Powder Blue.”
The patient and pretty “Love Kills Slowly” is led by a hesitant piano line, Rønnenfelt striking at the duality of love, noting that it offers both salvation and devastation (“Love, love kills slowly... We have nothing in the end / But love”); “Gold City” is similarly stuck between sentimentality and sadness. Salvation being a recurrent idea is most explicitly shown in the swaggering and stomping “Dear Saint Cecilia,” named as it is after the patron saint of music and musicians.
This is, at the end of things, A Tale of Two Songs, the opener and the closer. As Rønnenfelt is joined by the Lisboa Gospel Collective for the exultant chorus in “Shelter Song,” there’s a burning sense of compassion and closeness: “Come lay here beside me / They kick you when you’re up, they knock you when you’re down,” he insists. The album finishes with “The Holding Hand” and it’s quintessential Iceage. Reminiscent of their previous song “Against the Moon,” it’s equally foreboding and transcendent. Bubbling effects and echoing voices constrict and conflict, as the band aims to suffocate us. There’s an air of Fitzgerald’s solemn line at the end of The Great Gatsby as Rønnenfelt maintains, “And we row, on we go, these murky water bodies / Little known, little shown, just a distant call of sound,” the instrumentation crashing around him.
Iceage are a band acutely aware of the futile duality that exists in most of human existence: salvation and devastation, hope and hopelessness, comfort and isolation. A lesser band would have switched the positions of “Shelter Song” and “The Holding Hand”; that wouldn’t have been philosophically correct though. Five albums in, it doesn’t seem like they are done maturing and exploring, pillaging and discovering just yet.