November 6 - Metropolis

Since I have been exploring musical kinship a little bit this week, I thought I'd bring back Norwegian band Seigmen, a band that undoubtedly has listened to the atmospherics of Tool, as well as using Sylvia Massey as their producer - she had also worked with Tool prior to this, which was one of the great bragging rights before they released their 1995 album Metropolis. While it isn't as good an album as 1994's Total was, the title track lived up to the hype and then some. I think it is as good today as I thought it was then...

February 5 - Hjernen Er Alene

When I talked about DumDum Boys, I mentioned three other Norwegian bands that were popular at around the same time - and they also had in common that they sang in Norwegian. My least favorite of those three other bands was deLillos, which has a singer whose voice annoys the living daylights out of me, and whose lyrics in their naiveté get on my nerves. However, there are exceptions. Their third album, released in 1989, was a sprawling double album called Hjernen Er Alene (The Brain is Lonely), with a great murder ballad (Balladen om Kåre og Nelly - The Ballad of Kåre and Nelly), a happy song about spring, simply called Vår (Spring), a slow moody rocker called Venter På Telefon (Waiting For A Phonecall), and one of the greatest songs ever written about depression and loneliness in the title track.

I have to admit that there have been versions of this song released later that also have been great - and the best version is probably from a Norwegian TV show called Hver Gang Vi Møtes (Every Time We Meet), where Norwegian singers gather to interpret each other's songs, where the singer Elg (Elk - or Øyvind Elgenes) interprets it, bringing the rest of the singers there to tears (I had to include that one too, to contrast a little). While Elg's version has the desperation found in the loneliness, the original's very bare sonic structure and use of echo makes it more stripped down and naked, and so the emptiness of the loneliness is emphasized a little bit more. It is such a great song, and while I was set on only bringing you the original, I simply cannot help myself... First, here are deLillos from 1989:

Elg's version changes the character of the song. And I think he took lessons from Joe Cocker...

And finally, Seigmen's version of the song brings out more of the melancholy and gothic character of the song - at least to my ears...

February 4 - Döderlein

In 1993, when I was discovering Motorpsycho, there was another band that started to make waves. That band was from Tønsberg, in the southern part of Norway, and they started out quite similarly to Motorpsycho - all newspapers called both bands grunge bands, yet listening back to it, I think that was a very easy way out to try to connect Norwegian music to what was going on in Seattle. I don't think there ever was a huge feud between the two bands, but there seemed to be two camps forming. I was rooted in the Motorpsycho camp, which was more of a hippie aesthetic with long jams and experiments with noise. Seigmen, on the other hand, was more of an art project - at least they turned into one. Where Motorpsycho would go on stage and jam, Seigmen's lead singer was much more theatrical and studied, and their concerts always seemed to be studied and rehearsed, whereas Motorpsycho always have prided themselves in not repeating the same setlist from day to day.

Seigmen is in other words great music from Norway that absolutely is not Motorpsycho. I really developed an appreciation for Seigmen in 1994, when they released their album Total. The album was far more rooted in art rock and the type of metal bands like Tool played, and it was really propelled by the cover version of a Norwegian classic by deLillos called Hjernen Er Alene (The Brain is Lonely - watch tomorrow's post...). While that song was what made me initially open my ears, the rest of the album was stunning, and one of the singles from the album is the gorgeous Döderlein. It combines ethereal guitars with more aggressive and discordant breaks, creating the kind of contrast I really love in music.