Iceage – Seek Shelter Out May 7, 2021 on Mexican Summer With each new release,Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth and Dan
Kjær Nielsen refigure the contours of a typical Iceage song. This is especially
true of Seek Shelter, their fifth LP and first for Mexican Summer. Enrolling
Sonic Boom (Pete Kember of Spacemen 3) to produce the record and an additional
guitarist in the form of Casper Morilla Fernandez, Seek Shelter sees Iceage’s
propulsive momentum pushing them in new, expansive, ecstatic directions. A
decade on from their first record, Iceage continue to harness their lives
together through music. This journey, in music and life, has never progressed in
a linear fashion. Seek Shelter is the sound of a tight emotional core unwound.
Rain dripped through cracks in the ceiling of Namouche, the dilapidated
wood-paneled vintage studio in Lisbon where the band set up for 12 days. The
band had to arrange their equipment around puddles. Pieces of cloth covered
slowly filling buckets so that the sound of raindrops wouldn’t reach the
microphones. Kember arranged garden lamps from a nearby party store for mood
lighting in the high-ceiling space. It was the longest time Iceage have ever
spent making an album. When the rain had stopped, Seek Shelter revealed itself
as a collection of songs radiating warmth and a profound desire for salvation in
a world that’s spinning further and further out of control. Iceage started
making music together in 2008 as young teens in their hometown of Copenhagen.
The band’s 2011 debut, New Brigade, crystallized the raucous energy and
unbreakable brotherhood of Danish teenagers weaned on post-punk, hardcore and no
wave, and it found ears and kin around the world. 2012’s You’re Nothing was
hard, fast and raw, a bold doubling-down on the aggression of youth in the first
record as well as the weight of expectation. Plowing Into the Field of Love
(2014) and Beyondless (2018) saw a softening of the band’s hardest edges and the
arrival of a certain world-weary vaudeville in the Iceage sound. In an
extraordinary and unexpected run, the band had gone from the fertile hyperlocal
Copenhagen scene to stages all over the world. Iceage’s past two records — all
filtered twangy guitar riffs, sparse piano arrangements, and slinky, slow-moving
rhythms — ventured into an intoxicated but knowing swirl, surveying the party at
the end of the night. They’d seen it all, at least once, and their music rode
the crest of that chaos. Seek Shelter, the band’s first record made with an
outside producer brought in alongside longtime collaborator Nis Bysted, is the
place they have been called to next. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt casts the influence
of producer Sonic Boom as that of a sparring partner, another wayward mind to
bounce ideas off of and another pair of hands (along with Shawn Everett, who
mixed the record) to help shape the sound. Kember had said in an interview that
he’d like to produce for the band, and the feeling was mutual. Rønnenfelt
recalls being 12 or 13, listening to Spacemen 3, the band Kember co-founded in
1982 at the age of 16. “It was one of those things that just reverberated with
my being,” he explains. For Seek Shelter, “we wanted a partner that had some
noise that we didn’t have, more a wizard than a producer. We thought he’d be
that kind of wizard for us, and we were right — he came in with a truckload of
strange equipment that we’d never seen before.” Kember, reflecting on the
session and reaching for his highest praise, describes Iceage as “fucking show
offs, like everyone who was ever great and emotional and honest.” For Seek
Shelter’s story of scorched-earth salvation, the band’s songwriting embraces
conventional structures more conspicuously than it has in the past. The
dirge-like drone that opens the record gives way to a wall of reverb that sounds
fuller and brighter than anything they've committed to tape, signalling a
clarity of clouds breaking. American gospel and blues signatures break to the
front of the slow-grooving “Vendetta” and harmonica-flecked “Gold City,” a
record which sounds like the road, a desert mission under a blazing sun. The
Lisboa Gospel Collective, who joined the band for two tracks on the final day in
the studio, provide a new scale to Rønnenfelt’s incantations. There are moments
of unvarnished romanticism, as on the brisk Jacques Brel-like “Drink Rain,” and
an overcast tenderness that gently glides over “Love Kills Slowly.” The massive
“High & Hurt” interpolates “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a warhorse of the
American religious vernacular that has become an increasingly urgent plea over
the past century. It’s not the only anthem that calls out to the heavens: later
on, Rønnenfelt invokes the patron saint of music and poetry on “Dear Saint
Cecilia,” a song for seekers everywhere. “Writing a song is like trying to find
a space where you can make something that’s been riled up and down through the
years feel like it belongs to your present moment,” says Rønnenfelt. “It’s all
just scaffolding that you can project something onto.” Rønnenfelt’s lyricism
reaches grand heights despite its classic opacity — he sings of taking shelter,
of tranquil affections that threaten to combust, and of a limp-wristed god with
a cavalcade of devotees in search of relief. His expressionist imagery
consistently hinges on the divine, a natural result of his desire to take a
kernel of ordinary emotion and, as he explains, “blow it up like a balloon.” For
Seek Shelter, as with all Iceage’s previous albums, Rønnenfelt stowed away for a
set period of weeks and wrote the lyrics in one shot. “I set a time just to make
sure that all the lyrics are written from the same mindset,” he explains of
these weeks alone. The lyrics stem from journals that he’s kept over the past
few years: “it becomes an amalgamation of ideas and impressions of things that
you’ve been provoked by or had to live through. You end up with something that
is a rough, blurry perspective of what that period of time was like, a mishmash
of personal struggle that is shaded throughout by a world that seems more
transparent in its inherently cruel ways.” Romance and desire, as described in
“Love Kills Slowly” and the album closer “The Holding Hand,” are feelings that
stretch torturously — a race without a finish line. What precisely makes an
Iceage song is still a mysterious thing, and the band wishes to maintain this
protean quality. “If there’s ever a point in our history when something in the
songs starts to seem easy but doesn’t really excite us that much, we just
discard that shit right away,” he says. “You’ve always got to find a new vantage
point to attack the assignment of writing a song. If we had a formula, it would
be just a continuous watering down of what we do until we hated ourselves and
quit.” With Seek Shelter, they’ve managed to hold onto this core of presence and
risk while writing their most ambitious songs. Even Rønnenfelt was surprised
with what they were able to create together. “I think when we started we were
just lashing out completely blindfolded with no idea as to why we were doing
anything.” He’s speaking of the new record and also of their entire existence as
a band, a travelogue that has catapulted these four friends far past the
horizons of punk. “Some of that we wanted to remain intact. We try to keep the
mystery. If there's no sense of mystery in it for us, then it's not fun.” Seek
Shelter is a record that now exists at a moment of a collective unknown, when
every beating heart wonders what will happens next.
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