Warm, melodic and moving guitar music from Norway.
I Was A King have been at the heart of the Norwegian music scene for the best part of 20 years. For their 10th studio album, the band decamped to Bill Ryder-Jones’ studio in West Kirby just outside Liverpool. As well as being at the helm of the production, Ryder-Jones also contributed piano, harmonium and guitar to the record. The band have said that Ryder-Jones “took the music to new places, and sometimes we got lost. Part of the point of bringing in external producers is that they make something new happen.”
At the core of I Was A King are Frode Strømstads and Lise Frøkedal. This is an album of melodious, elegant songs which wear their influences very much on their sleeve, especially Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. In fact, in the past, the band released a single entitled ‘Norman Bleik‘ as a tribute to one of the Fannies’ main songwriters, the pun being that Bleik is also a small town in northern Norway. The band has intimated that the songs on this album convey tales of restless nights and yearning, of love entangled with suspicion, unfolding within lives that from their façade appear deceptively ordinary.
The album commences with the beautiful ‘Snow on the Transmission Tower‘, which contrasts the frozen, isolated Norwegian landscapes with the warmth of making a human connection, however brief that may be. ‘Sleepless Nights‘ could be an outtake from Teenage Fanclub’s ‘Bandwagonesque‘. The jangly ‘Nowhere Near‘ has a similar melody to Green Day’s ‘Basket Case‘, except it’s far more subtle and its tone is markedly more euphonious. ‘The Birthday Song‘ has a fiddle riff that’s been influenced by the one in The Waterboys’ ‘Fisherman’s Blues‘. ‘House Warming‘ starts with a guitar riff played on a single string; it’s initially reminiscent of a piece of C86 guitar pop until the Teenage Fanclub-esque, melodious vocals kick in.
Appropriately, the album closes with ‘Until the End‘. A mellifluent melody and a tale of a mid-life crisis recounted in a way such that it could have been written by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian. The band has described the record as a “collection of stories from the fickle nest we call home.” There’s some almost-perfect pop to be found here, and the strength of the melodies make this record well worth a listen.
