By:Larm is a bit like the Edinburgh Festival, but with brisker weather and more prominent beards: the latter presumably grown to offset the former. At every turn there’s a PR, label boss or bass player aching for you to come and check out their band, and concealing awkward piles of promo CDs about their persons. Competition is fierce, but friendly, as every nook and cranny of the city’s healthy live scene teems with musical life.
(Read part one of our By:Larm coverage HERE)
The festival proper begins on Thursday night and Finland’s Underwater Sleeping Society sound enticing – “six brilliant musicians with different hairdos” parps the official By:Larm bumph. In fact they provide an early glimpse of one of the week’s themes: the earnest band who could easily be Anglo-American. These are serious-minded musicians with a big eye on the international market and singers who could hail from anywhere between Oslo and Ohio. The feisty power-trio Heroes and Zeroes, much-discussed but oddly undistinguished Alexandria Quartet and well-received, country-flavoured El Cuero (all from Norway) also give it their all, on their way, they hope, to large stadiums somewhere.
Early rumours filter back of a full-on country-rock onslaught this year, in fact, and further evidence is gleaned from Le Corbeau late on Thursday: a Norwegian band named after a French film but who sound like a Nashville bar band. They even close with an insanely catchy Rembrandts-esque country-pop crossover effort, although a chorus about poking one’s eyes out may not be quite as radio-friendly as they’d wish.
Then there’s the lovely First Aid Kit (pictured), two teenage Swedish sisters (good start) with a nice line in knitwear and a nicer line in heartfelt folky anthems. They wear their influences as proudly as their cardigans with covers of Johnny Cash and Fleet Foxes and have the sort of spunky Scandi charm that is already catching on elsewhere. Catch them at London’s Field Day fest over the summer.
If you want further evidence that the prevalent folky feel here is North American rather than Nordic, a couple of songs by Kim Andre Rysstad should do the trick, as he’s the exception. Rysstad’s evocative vocal techniques come from deep within Norway’s soil and soul, and serve as a useful counterpoint to the Americana elsewhere. Props to By:Larm for getting him involved.
You can’t really blame bands for being nakedly ambitious at a festival-cum-conference such as this, given that much of the audience is made up of potentially-influential music-biz types, but the language factor can jar. Many a band will chat away between songs in Norwegian – as indeed they should – then sing each and every lyric in English. Okay, so most Scandinavians speak the Queen’s own tongue better than the average Londoner, but you wonder how we’d react if a host of English bands decided to take their Krautrock influences to the next level and do whole gigs in German.
Mixing it up is the best bet for keeping everyone onside, then, although there are several bands at By:Larm who are clearly ploughing their own furrow irrespective of who’s watching. Truly jaw dropping, for instance, are Ost and Kjex, an arty duo who once made a whole album “based exclusively on the sounds generated from cheese and crackers,” apparently. In By:Larm’s big city-centre tent, however, they take pumping live dance to an unexpected new level, with frontman ‘Cheesy’ looking uncannily like Al Murray the Pub Landlord channelling the spirit of Jimmy Somerville. Good voice though, albeit not as good as the perma-dancing African-style choir who take up the rest of the stage (if, indeed, they’re really singing). Cracking beats too, although from the listless reaction of the locals it seems Ost and Kjex may be rather less loved at home.
At the other end of the seriousness scale, Icelandic auteur Ólafur Arnalds makes laptop-and-piano-based ambient classical/electronica with help from an Amiina-like string quartet (Ólafur’s army?) that makes you want to weep, in a good way. Meanwhile Christian Fennesz’s collaboration with Norwegians Food looked a festival highlight on paper but – laying our cards on the table here – the improvisational electronic/sax/drums combo were a bit challenging for that late stage of the proceedings. Clash had a crack at ironic dancing and spent the rest of the evening nursing a dodgy back. Chiropractic karma.
Not dodgy enough to miss WhoMadeWho though, the already much-loved Danish outfit who closed out the fest and encompassed many of its finer points: outrageously unsuitable outfits (black and white smock/skin-tight catsuit on bearded men), lovingly-handled cover versions (Benny Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’) and a dedication to good old-fashioned stagecraft: running, jumping, jigging, general dicking about. A fine, and timely, finish. The tent was leaking and set to collapse and so were most of those inside it.
But a special mention here for our outsider tip of By:Larm 2009: Norma Sass, a hugely enjoyable hook-heavy pop-rock outfit who just happen to comprise of five very attractive young Oslo lasses. Some acts are a lot easier to plug than others.
(Read part one of our By:Larm coverage HERE)
(A Q&A with First Aid Kit – reviewed above – plus an exclusive live video with the duo will run next week on ClashMusic.com)
