Miike Snow – Miike Snow (Downtown)
4/5
By: Samuel Smith
The Jackalope: A mythical beast of North American legend. A jackrabbit with the horns of an Antelope that can convincingly imitate any sound, including the human voice. A killer, horned rabbit. The Jackalope can only breed during electrical storms. The meat of this mythical beast tastes like the flesh of a lobster.
If you close your eyes can you see its light-spun silhouette imprinted on the inside of your rosy eyelids? I can. But that’s probably because I’ve been staring at the artwork for the band Miike Snow’s self-titled debut album for the last hour, trying to think of the best way to introduce it. Whilst I will never win any awards for brilliant segueways, neither will you. There are none. So up yours. On with the show.
Miike Snow (pron. Meee-k Sn-oh) is constituently formed of three strange-looking Swedish fellows; Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnberg and Andrew Wyatt. The three formed the band back in 2007, after Karlsson and Winnberg decided that working as award winning production duo ‘Bloodshy & Avant’ (producing and writing hit songs for Kylie Minogue, Madonna and Britney Spears, including the Grammy winning pop classic ‘Toxic’) wasn’t providing them with the artistic integrity they desired. So, donning their musical hats, their collective musical talents tied up in handkerchiefs at the end of a stick, the band stepped into the studio.
Recorded in Stockholm in the 400 year old home used to house King Gustaf III's mistress, this debut bristles with over-confidence. As soon as you press play on the first track, it is overwhelmingly obvious that production is as essential a part to making music for these chaps as writing melodies, or playing their instruments. This can be somewhat distracting, as the construction of the song can often overpower the music itself, insistently pulling your often unwilling ears away from what would otherwise be quite a basic bunch of synth-pop songs. Leading single ‘Animal’ is a reggae-rhythmic off beat slice of catchy musical pie, but the hard right-to-left panning of the bouncing keys can get quite tiresome and a little confusing, particularly if you’ve just been listening to Adam Green.
However, once your sideways face holes get accustomed to the aural landscape of the album you can’t help but become increasingly intrigued by this bold, new and strange land of Pythagorean semi-pop. Like stepping off of a blind-dark plane into the sunlight of a snow saturated Norwegian airport in the middle of the day, your eyes too dazzled to appreciate the beauty, or to even see more than a few paces in front of you without squinting and stumbling. This album of seemingly simplistic pop songs is written and produced with a great deal of dextrous technical complexity. Seventh track Horse is Not A Home builds slowly over a juddering 4/4 kick; bubbling like a kettle on low heat as modulating synthesizers, tinkling refracted light piano’s and a phasing vocal line crack and trip over each other, echoing from hard left to hard right.
Recent single Burial tinkles and splutters over a stream of meaningless lyrics “Now it’s the funeral/I become the serial killer of us both” intones Mr Wyatt like a computer-generated lyrical sloth, but thankfully the tracks piano-laden melancholy and arpeggiated bleeping has an endearing quality that distracts from the commonly ridiculous lyrics. Similarly the track ‘Song For No One’ has a delightfully Jamie Lidell-esque verse, with a 50’s-ish rolling snare and single line Jazz guitar that adds a few shades of lightness to what is otherwise quite a dark affair.
Black and Blue is by far and away the album’s focal point. A seething pop song that features one of the best Moog noises these tired ears have ever heard, the kind of speaker-ripping noise that will have muso listeners everywhere trawling Youtube for live video clips to see quite how they do it. I recommend checking out their Jools Holland performance. The crux point of this album is that, for all its studio trickery, it is essentially a live album, one that the band are currently taking off on an extensive tour of the U.S. And it’s in a live scenario that these chaps put doubters to rest. Their proficiency and talent is unquestionable, but thankfully, they also look, sound and act like a band. And a good one at that.
Artists in this article: Miike Snow
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