West Nordic Waves
Songbyrd, Washington, D.C., September 22, 2023
There are basically a few things that will get my attention as much as free, live music, and because I have more ambition than common sense, I decided to grab a free ticket for the third night of shows in a row, while I was single parenting a very active 15-year-old last week.
I have been on the email list for the Icelandic embassy’s cultural programming for the last few years, and it’s apparently a very successful bit of cultural diplomacy, because in the span of time I’ve actually taken a vacation in Iceland. So, good marketing efforts there.
Iceland is now doing a collaboration with the government of Greenland and the Faroe Islands to promote their cultural and tourism resources. This is a new ambitious effort for the West Nordics, a rebranded region of the globe I’d never heard of before.
So for their free programming at the Songbird music house, they lined up a Greenlandic singer songwriter with backing music from Faroe Islands musicians, and an Icelandic punk band, Needless to say, this is music, I would’ve had no exposure to for other reasons.
The opening act was a Greenlandic singer songwriter who apparently fronts the country’s most popular rock band, which is called Nanook. It sounds like a bit of cultural appropriation, but Nanook is simply the Inuit word for the mythical great polar bear. The singer is
Frederik Eisner, a large, jovial, bearded man of apparently mixed Danish and Inuit ancestry, whose band has been one of Greenland’s most popular rock acts for years.
I would have assumed that being the most popular rock act in Greenland is kind of like being the most popular klezmer band in Burundi. But Eisner was a very appealing presence on stage, singing and strumming acoustic guitar in front of a nimble band of keyboard, bass, and drums. The band members backing Eisner were apparently all Faroese, but Eisner didn’t introduce them. The overall impression of the band was something between Band of Horses and Sigur Rós, ambitious, keening, space rock with Eisner singing in a not-quite falsetto. It was all very appealing stuff.
Singing in Greenlandic is clearly an aesthetic and cultural choice, since Eisner speaks fairly good English, and presumably is fluent in Danish and other languages as well. There was sometimes a country tinge to the acoustic guitar, and he frequently interrupted his songs to briefly explain the subject matter, which he described as mostly about the natural environment that he was surrounded with in Greenland. Even though I envision Greenland is a land of unending fjords and ice caps and jagged glacial geography, there were sometimes what I might describe as a rustic country element to the tone of the guitars, especially when he backed it up with his high lonesome singing. In another cultural context, and in a different language, you could almost imagine a kinship with American cowboy music.
I could not find Nanook or Eisner on Bandcamp but they are quite
visible on Spotify and streaming in general.
While Frederik Eisner‘s music was soothing and lovely and relatively quiet in its tone, the other band on the lineup was the opposite, Icelandic punk ensemble,
GRÓA.
Apparently a long-running concern in Reykjavík, despite the band members’ evident youth, GRÓA is an absolutely bonkers art punk group with some superficial similarities to X-Ray Specs. It should be possible to talk about a band from Iceland without mentioning Björk, but I don’t know how to do it, so I will say that the band accentuates a whisper-to-scream-to-shriek vocal performance very similar to the wilder tracks in the Sugarcubes, and the use of skronking saxophone and electric bass reminded me a lot of the early work of multiracial British punk ensembles, like the Slits and Rip Rig + Panic.
The band is led by sisters Karó Einarsdóttir (lead vocals, electric guitar, and keyboards) and Hrafnhildur (Hrabba) Einarsdóttir (drums), were backed by bassist Fríða Pétursdóttir and a saxophonist whose name I couldn’t track down. The band members spent much of the show running off and on the stage, playing sax from amidst the audience, lying on the floor playing electric guitar, and generally expressing mayhem. It was chaotic but actually danceable music and the audience — including the Iceland ambassador and other diplomats from the Nordic region — were all pretty engaged and everyone was having quite a good time despite the jovial chaos.
Most of GRÓA’s songs are in Icelandic, but they have a few with English lyrics, including “Respect the Nature!” and a hilarious “Grannypants” from the album What I Like to Do, in which the saxophonist managed to dance her way out of her trousers, showing old-lady underwear emblazoned with the song title.
This is certainly music I’m not going to listen to at home, but I was quite happy to see it in concert, where I suspect its chaotic appeal is more evident.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/2023 09:34AM by zwirnm.
