It is a delicate matter to review an album from your own scene. A friend of mine who used to work for a local Reykjavik newspaper told me once that he would never agree to review Icelandic albums. He felt that his view of any local album would be tainted by his own involvement as a musician in the local scene and that giving a bad review to a local band would be tantamount to screwing his friends over. I guess I just mansplained impartiality or lack thereof. Oh well, you get the point.
Anyway, there has been a lot of talk about Börn (formerly known as Norn) lately in Reykjavík. The buzz started shortly after their first few shows and that chatter has been pretty much uniformly positive. Further to that, they've been praised by Vice's Noisey blog recently and that article was shared around quite a bit ("Your new Icelandic post-punk saviours," it said), which has led to the feeling that people are taking notice from outside of Iceland - something that is always exciting for our little scene. I've also been to see them a few times already and from what I can see they are a very promising young band. Plenty of the feeling and energy that I want from my dark goth-y post-punk-ish rock.
And even if you were to judge the album only based on that surface genre type stuff, Börn does all right. There are the occasional dropped notes and beats, it’s not the clearest sounding record, and there’s nothing super new here in terms of the style, but that's hardly the point. What really made me want to learn more about this release, though, was hearing that that the lyrical themes of the record were about feminism and body image, which are subjects that are very close to my little transsexual, feminist heart. The fact that there are three awesome women in this band and one really cool guy who also happens to have a physical disability also tells me that they know what the fuck they're talking about. So, right off the bat, I'm very interested to listen closely to what they have to say. This isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish as the lyrics, which are in Icelandic, aren’t included with the LP that I picked up at Lucky Records, but Alexandra (who sings in the band) was nice enough to send them to me.
Sure enough, Börn delivers its most devastating punches in the lyrics. Each song approaches these heady themes from a different angle, whether it’s a battle call to defend the disenfranchised or a very personal statement of how these issues can make life difficult. It’s not only about body image or feminism, though. It's really about power. Who has it and who doesn't and what it means to have lived without it and (most importantly) where we can get it. (They conveniently list all these seats of power in "Sviðin Jörð".)
There is love here and also deep pain and these are voices here that need to be heard. Rarely has an album appeared in Iceland that is so perfectly itself and not an attempt to mimic something from somewhere else. Not perfect in the sense of some ideal, but truly representing itself in every sense from the cover imagery to the lyrics to the music. This is a band that I will continue to watch with great interest and I can recommend everyone else to do the same.
Check this out if you like: The Slits, Savages, White Lung, The Horrors, feminism, dark gothic punk rock.
Stand-out tracks: "Rotið eðli", "Holdfangin."
- Alison McNeil is a member of the band kimono. Follow her on twitter here.
Börn has some gothpunk qualities but to me gothpunk is dramatic while Börn is harsh negativity. The dominating guitar sound, the rumbling bass and hard hit drums are, well lets say as a imaginary experiment that Börn sound somewhere between Siouxie and Rudimentary Peni, but Souxie was drama and Rudimentary Peni schizophrenic. Börn have their own sound. Vocalist Alexandra has developed and grown as a vocalist since starting her first band with some other members of Börn. Her voice is dark, angry and mean as she half-shoutes the aforementioned negativity which I love. I listen to new albums every week but bits and pieces from this debut are in my head as I wake up in the morning.
I have seen many punk bands photographed on modern ruins, but Börn are one of the few that truly belong on that background. Thank you.
[Paradísarborgarplötur]
- Sigurður Harðarson
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