Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.12.2009, Síða 38

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 18 — 2009
22
Music | Live Review Music | Live Review
Why It Pays
To Quit
Your Day
Job
Svavar Knútur goes
Deutsch!
Pulling Teeth ...
...Can Have My Molars,
If They Promise To Stop Playing
Svavar Knútur, singer of Icelandic folk-
outfit Hraun, toured Germany a few
weeks ago. It was his second visit this
year after touring under the Norðrið
moniker this spring with Sprengjuhöl-
lin and Dísa. This second sting was a
solo tour, so he stuck mostly to playing
smaller bars and clubs. This did him
very well, as the concerts were generally
attended by about 50 people. The rooms
were thus packed, though the atmo-
sphere was still intimate.
The concerts were intimate sessions
where folks gathered around the singer-
slash-storyteller, who for most of the
tour wound up amongst his audience
talking, listening or even playing guitar
and singing with them after the show.
Svavar certainly managed to create a
friendly and familiar atmosphere. He is
the funniest guy I've seen play in years!
If it is his amazing solo-dialogue-play
about a singer-songwriter's seminar on
a castle in Denmark (“I even found a se-
cret door”), the colourful interpretation
of an Icelandic troll story or the final
climax of the show a medley of semi-
classic rock tunes (to name a few: The
Prodigy’s Firestarter, Bon Jovi’s Living
on a Prayer and Survivor's Eye of the Ti-
ger - all performed on ukulele). Svavar
has a sympathetic appearance and an
engaging sense of humour that makes
him an amazing entertainer. And he
knows it: “Oh, you're just clapping,
because I am amazing,” he says with
played indignation. And nobody man-
ages not to giggle.
Then suddenly—the laughter hasn’t
even died down—Svavar gets all seri-
ous. What follows is impressive: He tells
a story about a love long shipwrecked by
geographical distance and mistakes.
The room is completely silent and the
first chords of Emotional Anorexic fall
deeply into the ears of a stunned audi-
ence that had freaked out laughing just
moments ago. He got us again. The fol-
lowing verses were at least as authentic
as his hilarious songs, but he kept get-
ting even more honest and emotional.
His honest lyrics grow large as life as
the audience listens carefully. Everyone
here has dealt with this: love, loss, hurt.
We're not in this alone.
It would have been easy to stick to
the clown-show, to exploit people’s
good humour and snatch some cheap
gags throughout. But Svavar chooses
the really hard way, leading his audi-
ence through a wide palate of different
moods this evening. This led him to
talk about politics in the end, about Ice-
landic troll-myths, love and about quit-
ting his 9-to-5 day job to become a trou-
badour. This man is living his dream,
and I am glad he is.
So, by some bizarre paradox it’s Friday
the 13th and it’s as I'm riding a weird
and monstrous cloud of joy. Then,
amassed aural forces conspire to de-
stroy me. In a bad sense.
They say never judge a book by its
cover. “They” usually peddle books with
horrid covers. As do Bömmer. The less
said of them the better. Still, few suf-
fered through their set, as few were yet
in attendance.
Plastic Gods are next, and they roar
through an astonishing three numbers
in around thirty minutes. What a gla-
cial force to be reckoned with. Pushing
a deep sediment of sludge through a
filter of misery and bong water, these
lads are way too young, yet adequately
stoned, to be the true originators of the
crushing torrent of emotion oozing from
the super charged amps.
Out of Khanate-length drone furi-
ous mid-tempo stoner fare will some-
times emerge, drowned in an evil vein
of death metal growls á la Johnny Mor-
row of Iron Monkey. Slow nods of audi-
ence heads ensue and generous dozes
of THC in the blood stream are a clear
advantage to the experience.
Gone Postal are the bane of pre-
tence. Their shit, particularly with the
opening melodious dirge, is best con-
sumed mid-tempo and heavier than a
stack of anvils to the chest. Their take
on death metal is surely as indefin-
able as it is middle of the road: while
trudging forward the band is pretty
epic, but when speeding up they be-
come forgettably generic. By the time
GP take stage the venue finally sports a
few souls north of embarrassing and as
they slowly decimate the crowd these
young upstarts sprout a fountain of ir-
reverent enthusiasm. During the catchy
slow parts, as with the blastbeating
and grinding intervals, their pretty
boy singer/guitarist mines vocal veins
deeper then Dying Fetus while repeat-
edly soaring to Jon Chang-like heights
of register at the drop of a fucking hat.
Thus Gone Postal prove to be a veri-
table high point to a otherwise "meh"
kinda night, and accordingly reap some
deserved audience reward, somewhat
redeeming the show for the slack per-
formances to follow
Celestine were one of three bands I
had looked forward to seeing that night.
The initial wave of Cult of NeurIsis post-
metal the band used to revel in has
washed away somewhat, leaving room
for odd time signature crawl-cum-trots
of musical escapades steeped in pure
lead and avant-garde forays into the
fields of mind-fuck. But disaster strikes
early in the form of a snapped bass
string and a failing hi-hat clamp, during
the mending of which their singer begs
beer from various audience-members
and cultivates an inept repertoire of
stage patter that rhymes well with his
total lack of stage presence and his
decidedly sub-par vocal performance.
The usual hefty weight of a Celestine
show proves absent throughout the set
due to their tech problems. So does the
customary cathartic element as well as
most of their feral rage.
Pulling Teeth are aptly named. The
enthusiasm on the local metal chat
board went through the roof as soon
as the gig was announced, as it usually
does for mediocre acts that conform to
the outdated m.o. of “trueness” to the
adolescent scene kid’s expectation of
a band’s belonging to some inalienable
brotherhood of hardcore.
As with every other artist so far, Pull-
ing Teeth are unable to pull anything re-
sembling a tight performance out of a
ringer of slow-tempo annihilation-cum-
up-tempo irrelevance. Their anorexic
vocalist jumps up and down like a just
sprung jack-in-the-box, but he— like to
the limp tune of his unremarkable en-
semble of string benders—agonizes his
larynx merely to the waves of untidy,
sophomoric riffage that bear little rela-
tion to songs, much less any notion of
melody.
Meanwhile, a miniscule vortex of
scene kids revolve in a whirlpool of ec-
static circle pit exuberance and forced
stage dives explode from non-existing
platforms onto a crowd way too sparse
for actual surfing.
Near the end, some pit-loving aficio-
nados of the hardcore ethic grab hold
of the singer’s wiry neck and his lithe
stature while screaming along into his
mic, chord twisted around his neck like
a makeshift Jacob Bannon, in response
to which the man signals the universal
throat cutting sign of halt to his band
mates and they un-ceremoniously wrap
up a forgettable performance on that
note. Good riddance I say, the entrance
fee would have been better spent on
either the latest Coalesce or Converge
albums.
Sódóma Reykjavík 13.11.2009
Pulling Teeth
Celestine
Gone Postal
Plastic Gods
Bömmer
BoGi BjaRnaSon
GUÐnÝ THoRaREnSEn
FloRian ZüHlkE
HElEn THURa PalSSon