Reykjavík Grapevine - 22.05.2015, Qupperneq 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2015
performances they
crank up their gui-
tars loud enough for
people to feel it in
their bones, and they
themselves can be
found bouncing all
around the stage. “It’s
risky going to our
concerts,” Jónbjörn
says. “You could lose
your hearing, so you
have to ask yourself if
you dare show up.”
The songs them-
selves are also vola-
tile, with the themes
based on the band members’ alter
egos, who get into fights and are bit-
ter about not getting the girl they
fancy, although they laughingly ad-
mit very few of their lyrics make any
kind of real sense. “Then when we go
to interviews, people tell us, ‘Shit, I
thought you were going to trash the
place,’ which is funny because we’re
the most relaxed bunch of guys in the
world,” Jónbjörn says, laughing.
Going with the flow
The album that brought the Pink
Street Boys acclaim was ‘Trash From
The Boys’, a limited-edition laser-en-
graved cassette distributed by Lady
Boy Records. For all the praise it got,
the boys maintain that it wasn’t that
big of a deal. “It was just a collection
of homemade demos,” Jónbjörn says,
“and we’re always recording those.”
Conversely, their
newly released ‘Hits
#1’ is a studio-record-
ed album, which they
laid down in a single
night a year ago at
Hljóðriti studio in
Hafnarfjörður. “We
were well practised so
the music flowed very
naturally,” Jónbjörn
says, “and then we re-
corded the vocals in
our own studio. We
mixed the album our-
selves, but we took a
fucking long time do-
ing it! We had like ten different ver-
sions.” Víðir adds that they thought it
was very important for their first real
album to sound tight.
In the aforementioned drunken
interview, Axel expressed frustration
at how little interest there had been
from labels to release their album, but
Víðir says that 12 Tónar immediately
wanted to sign them after they played
Airwaves. Despite being raised on
MP3s and digital music, the band opt-
ed to make their first release a vinyl,
because they’re all really big music
nerds. “We hadn’t released anything
real, and we’ve been playing for nine
years now,” Jónbjörn says. “We just
wanted to have our own vinyl.”
What would make Jónbjörn even
prouder would be for PSB to influ-
ence a new generation of musicians.
“I want to find fourteen-to-fifteen-
year-old boys in a garage playing
the same kind of music we do. I’ve
scoured the internet, even looking
through Myspace, but I’ve only found
hip-hop or metal bands.”
On the subject of what the future
may hold for PSB, the two communi-
cate enthusiastically that they would
love to tour internationally, pausing
before admitting that they haven’t
been able to because they’re really
bad at organising themselves. “The
way that we’ve been working, it’s al-
ways been a ‘go with the flow’ scenar-
io—we need a manager to deal with
plans and that sort of stuff,” Víðir
says.
For now, what the boys have
planned is an album release concert
on May 22 with Seint, Godchilla, rus-
sian.girls and Singapore Sling. The
gig is at Kaffistofan, which is inci-
dentally the place where they played
their very first gig as PSB. They tell
me it’s a space that can only realisti-
cally fit 50 people, yet 250 have con-
firmed their attendance on Facebook.
“It’ll be rocked out, that’s for sure,”
Jónbjörn says.
Info: Pink Street Boys have
an album release concert at
Kaffistofan on May 22. Their
album ‘Hits #1’ is already
available in record stores.
When interviewing Muck and Pink
Street Boys, we kept thinking, “It would
be really interesting to hear the other
band’s thoughts on this.” So, rather than
engage in lengthy back-and-forths, we
invited drummers Ási Þórðarson and
Einar Björn Þórarinsson to just hash it
out over a pack of beers. What follows
is a short chapter from the lightly edited
transcript. You can read the full version
online.
You’ve both said that you are the
loudest band in Reykjavík. How
well do you think the other band
measures up to that claim?
Ási: I think the deal with Muck and
Pink Street is that they are both the best
Icelandic bands around today. What
these bands are doing is being real and
fuckin’ in your face, and that’s some-
thing I don’t think other bands dare to
do. Are we the loudest? Yeah, you know,
we said we were the loudest, and they
said so as well, and we’re both bloody
loud. But what really matters is that
we’re the best.
Einar: Yeah, what he said [Einar laughs].
Ási, you’ve said in a previous
interview that you’re a much
better drummer than Einar. Is
that true?
[Both laugh loudly]
E: Well, I only started playing drums
when Pink Street Boys came around,
and that was just two years ago. I’ve
been playing bass since I was twelve
years old and was in another band with
Axel—we had a drummer in that band,
but he was always so late to practice so
I’d play around on the drums until he ar-
rived and teach myself.
Á: I remember when Elli Bang [one of
Ojba Rasta‘s drummers, Celestine‘s for-
mer drummer] was interviewed in the
Eistnaflug film, he said, “When I go up
on stage, I just think to myself I’m going
to fucking demolish the other bands,”
and it’s the same for me—I’m simply go-
ing to be the best! Much better than the
bands that went on before me, and the
ones that’ll go after me, and that’s how
it is. When I said I was better than Einar
on the drums, it was like that, I was talk-
ing shit, because when I go on stage, I
plan on blowing everyone away.
E: That’s exactly what I think about
when I go on the drums, I’m just going
to put everything into it.
Á: And that’s fucking it! The music we’re
in, it’s not about a competition, but you
have to have a competitive mind-set go-
ing into it. You have to be fantastic when
you’re on stage, and you motivate your-
self up by telling yourself you’re much
better than everyone else.
Einar, your bandmates talked
about how important attitude
and alter egos were, and how they
set PSB apart from your older
bands. Do you also feel that way?
E: Oh yeah. Our old band, Dandelion
Seeds, was just a 60s psychedelic pop
band. We enjoyed it, but we didn’t have
nearly as much fun as PSB, where we
can blast away and rock out! PSB al-
lows us to talk trash, and be dicks [Einar
laughs]. Our stage presence is much live-
lier, too.
Á: How long has it been since a band has
talked so much trash and been this pro-
vocative in the Icelandic music scene?
When I first saw PSB live, I thought
it was the same fucking shit as Klink
or Mínus! It was a fucking dangerous
band! It was exactly what was needed,
and they gave Muck a real kick in the
ass, shifting us into the right gear and
away from the neutered Icelandic music
scene. To be fucking angry and fucking
scream and talk trash, that’s what it’s
about, and that’s why people are abso-
lutely eating up everything that PSB is
doing, because it’s provoking.
E: It’s funny how everything changes—
one year it’s really good to be super sen-
sitive and in touch with your emotions,
and then the next being cocky is in, and
then now it’s about being angry, but this
fashion, it’s all really so trivial.
PSB had numerous names, includ-
ing Kid Twist and Dandelion
Seeds, before settling on their
current one, while Muck were
Muck from day one. Why do you
think the other band went the
way they did with their choosing
their name?
E: That’s a really good question.
Á: I think fundamentally it’s the wrong
question to ask [Both laugh loudly]. It’s
because PSB are not Dandelion Seeds,
and they’re not Kid Twist. They’re not
changing their name, these are com-
pletely new bands.
E: Yeah, we changed everything. But
Muck, has it always been the same band?
Á: Yeah, we’ve been the same, except,
well, we fired our singer Villi [Ási
laughs]. There were five of us at one
point, and we had another bass player,
but we fired him pretty quickly because
he played terribly. When we recorded
our ‘Vultures’ album, he was so bad that
we had to ask Addi from Celestine to re-
cord over them.
E: Did you ever tell him about it?
Á: No, we didn’t, and he never found out.
Whoops, sorry, I think he knows
now.
[Both laugh loudly]
--
Read the full article at www.grapevine.is.
D R U M M E R V S . D R U M M E R
Muck vs. Pink Street Boys:
The Loudest Band In Iceland?
“I want to find
fourteen-to-fifteen-
year-old boys in a
garage playing the
same kind of music
we do. I’ve scoured
the internet, even
looking through
Myspace, but all I’ve
found have been
hip-hop or metal
bands.”