Nostalgia can be a funny thing. Far from a passive force, it causes the bohemian-minded to collect across the East River from Manhattan, and drives Tea Party folks daily toward that other Williamsburg that I get to call home. Despite conspicuous resemblances to the more upbeat threads of early-90s indie rock, it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call I Was A King a nostalgic band, in part because they’re Scandinavian. However, everything about Old Friends bespeaks a reinvention of the past, from its melodies to its title, and the band does a middling job of adding to the conversation.
“Fuzz-jangle,” “indie-fuzz-pop,” post-rock, and shoegaze are all workable descriptors that have been applied to the band. I won’t split hairs any more than that, but Old Friends will definitely feel familiar to fans of Manchester alt-rock or Mojave 3. On “Old Friends,” they could be talking about remembering their own influences with the line, “Catching up was hard to do/ All those years made you a stranger/ We were innocent but we changed/ To something new.” “Unreal,” effectively the midpoint of the album, reveals the merits and problems of the genre-amalgam — a guitar freak-out gives way to lilting, country-ish verses, which are separated by horn sections, string chording, and other additions. Texturally, their cup runneth over.
Songwriter Frode Strømstad is in a weird place on Old Friends, being asked to write songs simple enough to support the unique voices of a free-jazz drummer, Half-Handed Cloud’s John Ringhofer, and a host of other contributors. To be fair, the songs work well, and there’s even a tangible immediacy to some of them. “Forgive and Forget’s” call-and-response chorus lends itself to the band’s pop sensibilities as well as their huge crop of musicians; the following track, “Daybreak,” combines angular piano notes with a snotty harmonium and saxophone in a playful intro that unfortunately gets buried beneath the guitar-driven stylings of the rest of the song. However, although the arrangements are complex enough to make repeated listenings rewarding, there’s not much to distinguish the portrait gallery of guests from the sort of maximalist pop aesthetic that’s been around since Phil Spector.
Consider this quote from Pere Ubu’s David Thomas on the nature of rock music, from an interview with a St. Petersburg newspaper: “Rock music is in my blood. It’s not in yours. You presume too much to think it is. I do not claim Tolstoy. You cannot claim Elvis.” That sort of musical tribalism is really difficult to stand by in the electronic age and requires finding a way to creatively disregard the British Invasion entirely. It’s an interesting mindset to consider in the context of I Was A King, whom I’m sure Thomas would consider outside of the American rock bloodline. But the prominence of bands like I Was A King, and their more notable Scandinavian brethren like Sigur Rós, Peter Bjorn and John, and The Hives raises serious problems with considering rock music as a uniquely American folk culture.
So, I guess the question at the heart of the matter is this: Do you see Old Friends as an elegantly crafted forgery of musical ground that was broken years ago? Or do I Was A King deserve more credit than that? What do they add?
Well, certainly not Norwegian-ness. Aside from decent songcraft and some pretty cool guitar textures (see: intro to “Learning to Fly”), not much at all. The lyrics mostly follow white-kid reminiscences, and it’s best just to slot them in with all the rest of early-90s-mining that goes on on Old Friends, because they’re forgettable.
At a talk at EMPM, David Thomas drew the line in the sand: “The answer to ‘Can foreigners play rock music?’ is no. No. Not under any circumstances. But sometimes they can sure sound good if they don’t try.” I’m not sure I agree. But perhaps Strømstad and co. should have taken their own advice on “Echoes,” to “find a place we’ve never been.” That the line’s such a cliché gives it an added meaning and also a sense of urgency. Because, judging by Old Friends, they haven’t even left yet.
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