Following up last year’s You’re Nothing, Danish punk band Iceage have released their third studio album, Plowing Into the Field of Love. The Copenhagen natives have a considerably more confident and solid approach, but the young band still has a long way to go.
With an average age of 23, the four-piece group has already been a band for six years now. And yet, lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s howling vocals make the group sound much older. Instead of lyrics, Rønnenfelt throws a smattering of groans and shouts at the listener, like the way you would throw paint at a wall and hope something sticks. At times it is hard to know if he is even singing English words, which, to be fair, he may not be. They are from Denmark.
It’s a shame Rønnenfelt’s tuneless shouting is so prominent, because he covers up some actually pretty interesting instrumentals. Trilling trumpets on “Forever” hint at Spanish influences while repetitive piano triplets create a dark, grungy waltz on “On My Fingers” and the trotting percussion on “Cimmerian Shade” sounds like a southwestern march. But inevitably, the grunting comes back and drowns out all hope of melody.
Tracks like “Against the Moon” would be more successful if they focused less on lyrics such as “Whatever I do/ I do not repent/ I keep pissing against the moon,” and put more emphasis on the avant-garde staccato piano and piercing trumpet. Once the vocals drop out, the instrumentals build lazily to a dissonant and haunting end.
Somehow Plowing Into the Field of Love manages to end on a fairly good note with the title track. Chromatic guitar riffs battle with syncopated drums hits in a promisingly invented way, creating the effect I imagine they were going for on the whole album. But this is not enough to redeem the album in my eyes. At the risk of sounding like an ancient curmudgeon instead of a 20-year-old, I have to say this whole album gave me a headache.
Rating: C-
