Photo: Alberte Karrebaek
What does the inside of a teenager’s head sound like? Static at every configuration of pitch and volume – all the time – with undiscriminating rage as its manic conductor. Well, certain teenagers, anyway; the ones who find emotional (if not spiritual) fulfillment in punk rock, a genre that’s long played the tune trapped in all those young, feverish heads.
While the available biographical details are slight, we do know that Dan, Johan, Elias and Jakob are somewhere between the ages of 13 and 19. We know they’ve been around for a year, give or take, and that it’s extremely unlikely they picked up their first instruments in the same timeframe. And most importantly, we know that this four piece hammers out a frantic cobbling of post-punk, No Wave and hardcore with striking comfort and verve, as their already-in-second-pressing debut, New Brigade, demonstrates from the first paranoiac lurch of album opener “White Rune.”
They have an appropriate, sweet-and-dour sort of image they’ve cultivated for themselves: Deadpan live shows where cherubs seem to regularly bleed from their mouths, neo-masonic band logos hover consistently nearby and they’re swamped in dystopian lyricism. Hooded bong rips coupled with tongue-in-cheek sections played almost comically loose, completely intentionally, add a dimension to these kids that you usually don’t find in young punkers. If angered youth has been anything over the years, one-dimensional is certainly a pigeon hole well known. It all adds up to a winking expression of young nihilism very rarely seen so fully-formed.
But unlike the fuzzy dimensions of static noise, Iceage’s sound is loud and clear, and well-purposed, in a focus-fire of 30-plus years rolled up into one out-of-the-blue band. It’s not a confused first statement, and no faux squelch emit from the speakers, but they’re a rare group of teenagers who’ve put in enough work to make something worth talking about.
[Stream select tracks from New Brigade via Myspace.]
New Brigade is out now on What’s Your Rupture?.
