Good Norwegian Music! (part 3)

More recommended Norwegian music from the 2000s! As I stated in part 1, Norway may have its fair share of unoriginal pop/rock blandness, but there is much to be said for the new and original music being made here. At the time, I mentioned “Anglo-American cultural imperialism” and I’d like to qualify what I mean by that. I do not criticize Norwegians for singing in English, or for having English-language titles to their instrumental music. This is the only way to gain an international audience, and anyway I believe strongly in cross-pollination of cultures. And I like it. There’s nothing more tedious than narrow nationalism. I suppose what annoys me is when smaller nations feel they have to copy the most shallow clichés of the English-speaking world, out of some kind of twisted inferiority complex. The musicians I applaud in this blog elevate the forms of music in which they operate, and are in a great sense international.
Here’s a very good example of how much fun multi-cultural juxtapositions can be. The Norwegian band called Now We’ve Got Members.
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Now We’ve Got Members Le Jardin (Metronomicon Audio, 2003)
When I first DJed from this album (at an event in London), people were perplexed by what they were hearing: a mixture of thin indie guitar-playing/singing and overt Balkan melodies. Usually listeners are confronted by such melodies only in the context of “ethnic” music. Here no boundaries like that exist. The result is a kind of totally new pop. Initially, I didn’t like the few “non-Balkan” songs here, but they’re emotive, intricate, and they’ve grown on me. Anyway, there are songs that flit between styles, like the great three-part epic “The Garden”. Most surprising of all is “La Histoire Fantastique”, an almost cinematic piece, in which a Frenchman tells a story about some tomatoes.

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Now We’ve Got Members Tiny Disasters On/Off (Metronomicon Audio, 2004)
You can reverse the colourful sleeve of this album, so that it’s black-and-white, and its title becomes There is no sound in space, there is no wind on the moon. A development from the previous album, this time the band have acquired a great deal of sonic power, and Balkan-style melodies are performed with explosions of folk-pop energy. Long, complicated song structures dominate – it’s almost as if progressive rock could possibly be fun. Song titles like “You feel dizzy/we feel dizzy” and “?/?” say it all.
Other acts I’ve written about:
Deathprod
Portrait of David
Maja Ratkje
Salvatore
Supersilent
Susanna and the Magical Orchestra
The White Birch
Nils Økland

barry
Barry Kavanagh writes fiction, and has made music, formerly with Dacianos.

Contact him here.