Seek Shelter

Description

COPENHAGEN GROUP PUSHES ITS PUNK HORIZON ON ITS FIFTH ALBUM, PRODUCED BY SONIC BOOM. Copenhagen group Iceage - Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth and Dan Kjær Nielsen - return with a fifth album, Seek Shelter, produced by Sonic Boom for the Mexican Summer label. With Sonic Boom, aka Pete Kember of Spacemen 3, producing and new guitarist Casper Morilla Fernandez, Seek Shelter leads the band in new directions. More sorcerer than producer, Pete Kember arrived with a strange array of sonic paraphernalia. Like Shawn Everett, who mixed the album, he is a fighting partner, another rebellious spirit to bounce ideas off and shape the sound. Iceage's songwriting here embraces conventional structures more visibly than in the past. The funeral drone that opens the album gives way to a wall of reverb that sounds even louder and brighter than before. And the Lisboa Gospel Collective, who joined the band on two tracks, adds a new dimension to Elias' incantations. As on all previous Iceage albums, Elias retreated for several weeks to write the lyrics for Seek Shelter in one go. His lyrics reach new heights despite their usual opacity. His expressionistic imagery constantly revolves around the divine, the natural result of his desire to take a kernel of ordinary emotion and explode it like a balloon. During recording, rain seeped through the ceiling of Namouche, the woody, dilapidated Lisbon studio where Iceage set up for a dozen days. The band had to arrange their equipment around puddles. Pieces of fabric covered buckets to muffle the sound of drips. This is the first time the band has spent so much time making an album. And when the rain stopped, Seek Shelter revealed itself as a collection of songs with radiant warmth and a deep desire for salvation in an increasingly out-of-control world. Even Elias was surprised by what they had been able to create together, not only with this new album but also with their entire existence as a band, a travelogue that catapulted these four friends far beyond the horizons of punk.