The young Danish punk group Iceage makes claustrophobic songs so short and dense they make you breathe in a shallow fashion to preserve their limited oxygen. The band has also gained what may feel like a claustrophobic reputation. The swift militaristic efficiency of their musical maneuvers, the transgressive influence of dead French surrealists, and the heavily reported flirtations with nationalist and fascist imagery have added up to a distinctly aggressive image, even though the members look more like One Direction-gone-to-seed than bellicose reactionaries. That’s what makes Vår, the new band of Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, sound like a refutation rather than a mere tangent-- or at least, a balancing of scales.
Vår is something of an unusual supergroup within the boundaries of Copenhagen's thriving D.I.Y. hardcore scene. Joining Rønnenfelt are Loke Rahbek of Sexdrome and Kristian Emdal of Lower, along with Lukas Højland. Their similarities to Iceage end with the purported influence of Georges Bataille-- which might account for the absurdist poetry moaning over the doomy electronic pulses of their song "Hair Like Feathers"-- and the use of rolling field snares, suggesting the forced marches of valiantly defeated armies. But Rønnenfelt's downcast voice and mournful, dystopian lyrics are laid bare by the krautrock, industrial, goth- and synth-pop styles that replace guitar thrash on No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers. Though crusted with rough textures, the music is as open and vulnerable as the Copenhagen punk bands are clenched and impervious, bending the same apocalyptic impulse in a serene, interior, even sensuous direction.
For being recorded in a cramped home studio in Bushwick last summer, Vår's Sacred Bones debut feels surprisingly spacious and cool, roaming a wide swath between the softest borders of Joy Division, Kraftwerk, and the Foley-effected, electro-acoustic war folk of These New Puritans. Throughout the album, samples of broken glass and metal, acoustic and electric guitars, analog electronics, bleary trumpets, and processed percussion line up in soft curves with scoured edges. Bright Eyes may have beat Vår to the mirrored album cover by 13 years, but Vår's choice of artwork makes a sound contextual point: This is reflective music, making the listener complicit.
At their poppiest, as on "The World Fell" and "Pictures of Today/Victorial", Vår set raggedly reaching multi-tracked vocals (apparently canned in Germany in the 1970s) over thumping beats and chiming guitars that think they're synthesizers. The velvety, sparkling miasma of the latter represents this collaboration at its most realized, the low heat gradually igniting the snarled images of iron and fire at the end. Not everything is that considered: "Motionless Duties" breaks the dreamy mood with its darkness and abrasion, though woozy trumpet peals eventually open it up a bit, and the drums-and-drones piece "Boy" is a long interstitial at four minutes.
But ventures outside of Teutonic synth-pop pay off in the title track, where Pharmakon's Margaret Chardiet gives a remarkably tender recitation atop a pillow of distorted symphonic ambiance. A stirring piece of music in its own right, it also feels like another deliberate attempt, following the video for “In Your Arms (Final Fantasy)”, by the punks of Vår to soften a brittle public perception of themselves as right-wing hawks. Although the sensitive side it reveals is less developed than their established one, it's just as intriguing.
