Now We’ve Got Members, concidered to be the flagship of the small Oslo-based CD/CD-R label, Metronomicon Audio, are celebrating ten years as a band by playing through big parts of their catalogue, starting at the beginning, before they’ll release a new album titled Repulsive Force sometime this fall.
In the beginning, the band didn’t have any members at all. Today, the band has ten members, and in some live situations they’re augmented by additional musicians, forming an ensemble of as many as fifteen members. They describe their music as a mixture of musical styles from near and distant hemispheres, all relative to which hemisphere the listener might be situated. The sound has elements of both balkan folk music and arabian funk, as well as progressive rock (without the rock), disco (without the mirrorballs) and free jazz (without the jazz) and it’s all neatly merged together in their complex yet hummable pop tunes.
Dave Mahler is a 17-year-old from Australia and he has just recently finished making a music video for the song “All The Jokes Are On Me” from the Norwegian band Firefly Effects. He’s also made videos for Le Corbeau and Koppen.
The video is made up of as much as 1640 hand drawn and water colored frames and it took him four months to make it. With pastel colors and a that hand drawn style, it looks really good. Most people will probably think of A-ha’s “Take on Me”, though I’d say this one has a lot more charm.
Klak Tik comes from the Faroe Islands, which is quite a unique place. For those who don’t know, it’s an island group located between Scotland and Iceland. Even to this day it’s still part of the kingdom of Denmark. People might be familiar with the folk artist Teitur who is also native to the islands.
Beezewax shouldn’t need any presentation, but unfortunately, they do. They never had a real breakthrough in Norway, and that’s a shame. Beezewax is a great pop band from Østfold with great songs, great melodies, epic guitars and lovely noise. Although their albums have been well recieved by critics, they’ve never made any commercial success, even though they have made five fantastic albums, and a few EP’s as well.
Yoyoyo Acapulco are an indie pop band playing cute, quirky ukulele-based pop music with kind of naive and catchy lyrics. You’d think that “Heey, they’re probably from Oslo or Bergen, right?”, but no. These guys are from no other place than Vestre Gausdal. Not your first guess, huh? I can’t help but love their simple, yet extremely catchy tunes.
I play the ukulele a bit myself actually, and these guys are really my main inspiration and the true reason why I started playing. Thanks!
They played at the Øya Festival in 2008, I was there and, despite the fact that the bubble-machine sprayed bubbles in my face the whole time, it was definitely one of the best shows at Øya that year. They played in a tiny tent, without that stopping them from making it a big show. Rather, it was the fact that it was a small, crowded tent that really made the mood.
The say that My Little Pony is the coziest band in Norway, but the coziest Singer-songwriter is definitely our very own superstar, Egil Olsen (not to be confused with the football coach with the same name). Egil writes dreamy and catchy pop songs about love and his hard life as a wannabe superstar.
He first started a band called Uncle’s Institution and released several albums (you can download them for free on his website), but after a trip to the states to find himself, he found the solo artist within. After releasing his beautiful debut album, I am a singer/songwriter in 2007, as well as a hip hop cover-album (freely available for download here), he’s releasing the album Nothing like the love I have for you, which will be out on CD, vinyl and mp3 download on 5. October.
No, this is not Pippi Longstocking’s monkey, but a band with the same name.
It all started a few years ago when I went in to a store that sells used CD’s. Flipping through shelf after shelf filled with CDs, I had no idea what I was looking for, but that’s when I saw it; an album called Downhill Thrill by some band named Herr Nilsson (or Mister Nilsson, if you will). I had barely heard about them, All I knew was that they’re from Bergen. Despite not knowing remotely what they sounded like, I just knew that I had to buy this album. That’s not something I would live to regret.
I want to recomend Kråkesølv, a fantastic band from a place far beyond the polar circle. Bodø to be precise. The first time I saw them was in the small Camp Indie-tent at the Øya festival in Oslo. It rained a bit that day and I wasn’t sure of what I should expect. They have been hyped a lot, and both Simen Herning (My Little Pony) and Øystein Greni (Bigbang) have endorsed them. As always, I’m a bit sceptical when it comes to hypes, but when they first started playing, I was sold. It was fantastic, and when they played the song “Skredder,” I understood that they were something special and something new.
Candy Claws is a duo from Fort Collins, Colorado. They spent their first two years as a band writing and recording their first album. Which in their words was their “musical companion” to Rachel Carson’s book called “The Sea Around Us”. They describe Carson’s book as a non-fiction scientific book “imbued with beauty and mystery, written in such elegant prose it feels more like poetry, a “hymn to the sea”. A hymn to the sea is quite a fitting expression to use here too since the album contains recorded sounds from different shores around in the world. From the seas of Italy to the Philippines. The band have acknowledged how this might sound like a gimmick but they feel it added a personal quality since it was recorded at places that were dear to them. It is hard to dismiss the creativity from these two.
Why, hello there and welcome to this humble blog. If you haven’t just found this post way back in a seemingly endless archive, you can relax. This blog is new, fresh, straight from the oven and you are one of those few lucky (and really rad) people who’ll get to say that you’ve been reading that great birds something-something blog all the way since they started up.
Those few who had already heard of us weeks before we launched, are following us, fans on facebook and so on (thanks by the way!) might have been curious as to what this would look like, what the hell the name means, and what people are behind this. Your endless waiting and refreshing of the browser window is over!