For it is by grace that we are saved. With For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, Iceage proclaim the same ought to be true of love: an eternal offering of devotion — to oneself, a partner, friends, the divine — willingly given without the expectation of reciprocity.The Danish post-punk band have been turning out evolutionary albums for the past 18 years at a relaxed, purposeful pace. They growled their way through their industrial and cacophonous debut, New Brigade, finding immediate acclaim and success as teenagers. 2014's Plowing Into the Field of Love showed them as an ambitious quintet, ready to push boundaries and introduce antithetical classical sounds into their shadowy sound, while subsequent LPs Beyondless and Seek Shelter were maximalist efforts in artistic development.With their latest offering, Iceage — who have spent the entirety of their careers reaching into the stars to develop their sound — return to the earth. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter seeks not to explode into the nebulous but rather implode into itself, violently collapsing inward, condensing all structural matter and emulsifying their sound. Urgent and raw, it sheds excesses both lyrically and compositionally. At times, it's crystalline, riff-focused and melodious; at others, that beauty is turned into the gnarled, harsh tones of insurrection.In many ways, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter is the band's most refined album to date, despite its compulsive and swift development. Written and recorded over the course of a week in a remote studio in southern Sweden, the songs were pieced together in a manner that let them feed off of each member's improvisational impulses. The interwoven themes of love and annihilation have always been part of the whole undertaking under the guidance of singer Elias Rønnenfelt's lyrics, but the newfound immediacy of their recording approach seems to have fused them into the very elemental nature of the record."I love you in an ominous way," declares Rønnenfelt in the album's opening minutes on "Ember." Through the galloping snare drums and buckling lead guitar, the singer runs that gamut of love's mayhem, in all its burning glory and polluted corruptibility. "Are you willing to pay / Are you willing to break / With all that's lain before you / Before you're swept and breathless in the dirty ground?" he asks. Similarly, the straightforward analogy of "Star" turns love into an omnipresent state of being: "Every inch of my earth and sky / You can occupy / Cover me entirely." The hypnotic rhythm section sprints forward, propelling the songs faster than Rønnenfelt seems to be able to keep up with. He stumbles over his own words with his characteristic cadence, making it feel as if they're streaming out of his mouth subconsciously. It's a bombastic pop-driven track that's unmistakably honest and unvulcanized — that is, until the inexplicable ending (perhaps a reference to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark?). At other times, themes of love and grace are obscured by the gritty underbelly of life. In the narrative-driven "mother-of-pearl," a sex worker named Mary finds out she's pregnant with the child of a heroin addict ("Expecting in that shithouse party flat / The girls next room, they snort till they collapse"), the scene painted with an empathetic anthropological insight. In the end, "a healthy child grows to walk the earth on their own" — and, as Rønnenfelt states, "Wherever it may be, no one can disagree / It will be yours truly."The unity of love and grace is felt most tellingly through spiritual devotion. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter is quite pious, and the conspicuous religiosity is folded in with the band's punk proclivities in such a way that both persuasions feel deeply considered and honoured.At times, Iceage hide the theology in the danceability of "Match Head Girl," with its surrealism and Rønnenfelt's incredibly strange scatting hook. At other times, the songs overflow with theological motives: "I'll not fear / And I'll not weep for those who rest in sleep / For those who wallow, ever in the deep / For I know there is a blessed shore, darling / A place beyond," sings Rønnenfelt on the shimmering apocryphal "No Fear."Like true-believer icon Nick Cave, at their most zealous, the band blend metaphysical religious imagery with the tactility of the concrete. Throughout closer "True Blue" — a colour and phrase often associated with the Virgin Mary to represent a steadfast and unwavering faith — the slow revving of an electric guitar bottleneck slide feels neither searing nor glossy. The haunting, intuitive build of the song follows a "deranged" and "mentally ill" Rønnenfelt on the verge of "nirvana," who claims in the record's final stanza that "rapture's upon us": "Eat up the fodder / And we're headed for the true blue."Iceage have always seemed to reach for something beyond themselves, attempting to glimpse an ineffable divine. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter embraces all that's beyond the limits of logic, illuminating the imagination of the human spirit when grace, love, and salvation are known and understood to be an eternal gift.
Wavelength
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