I was talking to a guy at a party the other night and we agreed we hated Erlend Oye (sorry, I don't know how to get the accent marks right on my keyboard). We hate because we love too much. It's not fair for a guy to be this immensely likable and good at everything. When he emerged early in this decade as one half of the sensitive folk duo Kings of Convenience, he was easy enough to manage - hell, he wasn't even the best-looking guy in the band!
Then, during the Kings' extended hiatus between their two albums, he released his solo debut - a headlong lunge into electro which had been foreshadowed by KoC's adventurous remix album (as well as Oye's lead vocal turn on Royksopp's "Poor Leno"). Lending his voice to tracks supplied by Prefuse 73, Schneider TM, Morgan Geist and other electronic music players, it was still easy to see him as simply "the skinny guy from Kings of Convenience."
I certainly didn't see his entry in K7!'s "DJ Kicks" series coming. In a few short years, it's become one of the signposts for dance music this decade - it's eclectic, fun and possesses a whimsical disregard for technical proficiency. For better or worse, it made DJing sound easy.
The Whitest Boy Alive is, at surface level, his "rock band." The songs on their two albums (2006's "Dreams" and the forthcoming "Rules") share similarities with the minimalist pop of Young Marble Giants and the dance backbeat of Phoenix throughout all their genre dalliances. In truth, they never rock that hard, but I've immensely enjoyed everything they've done, especially this song from "Rules", which begins with a slight skip in its step and ends with a full-on disco breakdown. Its awesomeness only adds to my jealousy-fueled "hatred" of Erlend Oye.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment