Iceage
Beyondless

Iceage – Beyondless

Fourth album for the Danish band Iceage, now detached from the wave and post-punk sounds of their beginnings and landing into something contaminated and different, similar to what Algiers, their label mates on Matador, are doing.

“Hurrah” opens the record with post-punk references, a narrative singing style reminiscent of Nick Cave on a charged and energetic base, while in the next track, horns and hints of a disturbed soul, with vintage sounds, appear.

Even when it comes to classic sounds, Northern European groups have always maintained a very American approach to production, with a formal cleanliness and precision that can lead to openings towards the mainstream and the rock audience more generally, as happened years earlier with bands like The International Noise Conspiracy and The Hives.

“Under The Sun” takes on seventies colors, a suffering psychedelic ballad, among the best tracks on the record, like a 2018 Alice Cooper, turned punk with classy string arrangements at the end.

“The Day The Music Dies” raises the tempo, between Stooges and Gun Club, complete with honky tonk piano and horn arrangements, sustained by a powerful and present distorted bass, the result of a few hundred watts in saturation. “Plead The Fifth” is another convincing track, once again with echoes of Nick Cave but in a much more discreet way compared to bands like Protomartyr. It's followed by “Catch It”, which takes us to Manchester, with the same pace as a song by the Happy Mondays, slowed down and transformed into a toxic and sick mid-tempo.

“Thieves Like Us” sinks its roots into glam rock and punk with a nice change of pace, accelerations and slowdowns, as precious as oxygen in an era like this one dominated by Protools grids.

“Beyondless” is a complete, eclectic and vibrant album, with no element out of place, a summary of the best that has happened in the last forty years of alternative rock, played and arranged with great competence and richness of arrangements. Despite this, upon repeated listening, it shows some limitations. The winning songs, those that linger in memory, are missing; there are too many styles, many ideas, and the arrangement cannot overcome some deficiencies in songwriting. Retro horns and strings cannot be the only ingredient for rock innovation, perhaps following the path of the latest Queens Of The Stoneage, an album in which, unlike “Beyondless”, guitars are far from being sacrificed, while here they seem to be an insignificant side dish.