Iceage – New Brigade (What’s Your Rupture)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
It’s not like anyone knows what the word ‘album’ really means any more, right? So it’d be wrong to complain that the debut ‘album’ from obnoxious rock and roll outfit Iceage doesn’t even last as long as the final song on Sufjan Stevens’ The Age Of Adz. There are more ideas on display in this paltry 24 minute (24 minute!) collection than most guitar outfits cram in to three records’ worth of output, and given that in the current climate it’s extremely rare that any guitar band gets to release three whole records, this illustrates just how exciting it is to have a band like Copenhagen’s Iceage yelling in your face like they do.
Opener of sorts ‘White Rune’ sets out the stall – this is a band trying to play their songs so fast that they stop them as soon as they collapse under the weight of their own temporal ambition. There’s a reason that these tunes are short, and it’s a bodily one rather than anything to do with running out of ideas – it’d be physically impossible (or at the very least inadvisable) to carry on these grotesque little ditties for longer than the few minutes they each stretch, such is their intensity. Give them some samplers, and a drum machine, then maybe. But these fools are intent on doing it themselves, even in the face of the fact that computers are now way better at going at this pummelling shit than any of us fleshy little weaklings. Just ask Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
But brevity plays to Iceage’s strengths as songwriters as well as musicians. There are great indie pop songs here, buried as they are under a mire of every instrument sounding like it’s long overdue a service. ‘Remember’ in particular does the verse bridge chorus verse bridge chorus STOP THERE THANKS thing superbly, and brings to mind something the Pixies’ Black Francis said of Buddy Holly – to paraphrase, if your song doesn’t need to go on for longer than 2’13”, then pal, don’t force it to (Black Francis seems like the kind of guy who would use a word like ‘pal’).
Though these four Danish boys are certainly noisier, the comparison with Francis’s mob - the undisputed kings of the pithy, abrasive indie pop song - is one I’m happy to defend. The other older bands they take their cues from suggest further that these are indeed fellows of taste - Big Black certainly come through in the guitar sounds on ‘Broken Bone’, and Mudhoney wish they could still play as fast as ‘Collapse’ would require them to. That said, this is unmistakably a record born out of youth, and the fact that you can only convincingly make a cacophony quite like this one if you view middle age with the same contempt you hold for death. And in that respect, it sounds very current.
The only problem with its diminutive running time is that New Brigade perhaps finds itself in danger of being overlooked simply because there isn’t very much of it. But that’s no reason to bloat the record out beyond these thrilling few moments. I don’t really want to know what 50 minutes of Iceage sound like, to be honest. Heck, I don’t really care what 25 minutes of Iceage sounds like. Nor am I sure where it can go next, if indeed it has to go anywhere – and I reckon the band are as unconcerned with their long term future as I am. For the two dozen minutes it spends squatting in my ears, it sounds like as fine a mess of a guitar record as I’ve heard in an age.
ICEAGE - WHITE RUNE by squidrobot
Artists in this article: Iceage
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