It’s been six years since Iceage released their debut album, New Brigade. At the time the Copenhagen outfit were all teenagers, projecting an almost nihilistic disdain for seemingly everything, funnelling it through a brooding and malevolent wreckage of post-punk indebted, industrial-tinged guitar vehemence. Leading the charge of this brigade was singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, a young man who gargled and wailed his way through songs with a style that appeared equally rooted in drunken slurring as it did incensed outbursts.
Iceage have now released three albums and by their third, 2014’s Plowing Into The Field Of Love, the group’s palate had expanded dramatically from the one-note assault of their debut into a more Bad Seeds meets the Pogues yield, as they toyed more with adventurous song structures, the album teeming with piano keys, acoustic guitars, strings and brass. Their musical transition over the years in clear correlation to the vast changes one goes through from teenage years and into their twenties.
Rønnenfelt has always had an active second project aside from Iceage in Marching Church, a once-solo venture that has now, over two albums and three EPs, mutated into a living and touring band of its own. Marching Church, much like Iceage, are a group that continue to push conventional song structures to breaking point, colliding seemingly clashing sounds into an output that appears to relish in being as melodic and intoxicating as it does distancing and jarring. Such traits are clearly reflected in Rønnenfelt ‘s thirteen picks here and he has – while still only 24-years-old – been a voracious absorber of music from a very young age, as he recalls keeping himself awake as a ten year-old to the enticing but terrifying sounds of David Bowie’s ‘Andy Warhol’ – an impact his own music may now have on many a child of that age.
Marching Church play the Roskilde Festival this year. It takes place between 24th June and 1st July – for more line-up information and tickets visit the festival website. Click the picture of Elias below to begin the Baker’s Dozen
