Here it is: the most exhilarating album I didn\u2019t review yet this year.<\/p>\n
If Led Zeppelin was the proof of concept for European bands combining jacked-up, bruising blues-rock with gentle folky ballads, then Kaleo is version 7.0 or so. These four young Icelanders\u2014JJ Julius Son (lead vocals, guitar, keys), David Antonsson (drums, vocals), Daniel Kristjansson (bass), and Rubin Pollock (guitar, vocals)\u2014take a familiar, heady mix of Delta blues and acoustic folk and add in a healthy dose of Nordic thunder, counter-balanced on the quieter songs by their frontman\u2019s remarkable range. Add in Julius Son\u2019s fondness for vinyl and you end up with a debut album nominally split into a fiery, ferocious side A and a softer, more contemplative side B.<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cNo Good\u201d is a full-on assault, heavy riffage over a stomping beat as Julius Son exhorts the crowd: \u201cYou can tell I got fever \/ You try to shake it off, try it all you want \/ It won\u2019t do you no good.\u201d By the time you get to the wailing breakdown and solo section, the momentum is positively tidal. \u201cWay Down You Go\u201d starts off rich with portent, the rhythm section digging a pulsing, deliberate groove that gives the whole song the feeling of a tribal chant, building with subtle textural elements: piano, handclaps, harmony vocals, and laser beam guitar notes. The musical tension grows and is never entirely resolved, leaving the listener unsettled.<\/p>\n
\u201cBroken Bones\u201d offers a straight-up back-porch blues with a shuffling gait, but there\u2019s something inevitably exotic about it simply because of who\u2019s singing it; it\u2019s a cultural mashup of the best kind. Batting cleanup, \u201cGlass House\u201d comes galloping into view astride a raucous hook that will have you punching the air before the first verse is done. Add a wordless, rousing chant for a chorus and it\u2019s easy to imagine a packed arena singing along to every syllable. (This track also manages to distill the essence of rock and roll into just five words: \u201cC\u2019mon baby, don\u2019t say maybe.\u201d) Closing out side A, \u201cHot Blood\u201d lives up to its title, a glammy, growly rocker with tremendous velocity.<\/p>\n
Side B opens with the song that broke the band outside their native land. You might think titling a ballad \u201cAll The Pretty Girls\u201d feels a little obvious, but 15 seconds into this track when Pollock\u2019s gently strummed acoustic guitar meets Julius Son\u2019s suddenly angelic voice, it\u2019s all over. By the time the rhythm section, harmony vocals and strings eventually arrive, you\u2019re long since under the spell of an absolutely devastating falsetto.<\/p>\n
Acoustic blues number \u201cAutomobile\u201d sketches a companionable road song before giving way to \u201cVor \u00cd Vaglask\u00f3gi,\u201d the only track here sung in Icelandic. The language barrier proves no barrier at all thanks to the emotion the group brings to their performance, revealing this shimmering mid-tempo number as a evocative, elegiac love song. That amazing falsetto returns for the delicate \u201cSave Yourself,\u201d setting up extended closer \u201cI Can\u2019t Go On Without You,\u201d whose gentle pleadings give way to brief, electric eruptions of frustration, another Zeppelin-esque number that leaves its considerable musical tension largely unresolved.<\/p>\n
From the Viking war cry of \u201cGlass House\u201d to the haunting falsetto of \u201cAll The Pretty Girls,\u201d Julius Son delivers one of 2016\u2019s most memorable vocal performances. The fact that he, Antonsson and Kristjansson have been playing together since they were 14 is evident in the unconscious, hypnotic grooves they fall into on almost every track, with Pollock providing complementary fireworks on both electric and acoustic guitars.<\/p>\n
A very impressive major-label debut, Kaleo\u2019s A\/B<\/i> feels like a blast of Nordic winter air, firing all the senses into overdrive and demanding complete attention. Whatever comes next, count me in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":32771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[9840],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-44717","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-kaleo","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44717"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44717"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}