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Norwegian wood
Kings of Convenience quietly persevere
BY MIKAEL WOOD
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Kings of Convenience's official Web site

Since the title of their 2001 album Quiet Is the New Loud gave rise to countless magazine stories about the rebirth of acoustic music in a post-rap-rock age, we haven’t heard much from Kings of Convenience, the Norwegian duo of Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe. At least as a band. Øye has kept himself in the public eye as a restless member of the international electronic-music community, releasing a solo album called Unrest that found him collaborating with producers like Prefuse 73 and Morgan Geist, and a playful volume in the DJ-Kicks mix-CD series that featured him singing over cuts by pals like the Rapture and fellow Norwegians Röyksopp. But what’s Bøe been up to? You have to call him at home in Bergen to find out.

"I’ve been completing my clinical-psychology degree and writing songs and staying true to the ideology of ‘Quiet is the new loud,’ " he replies. "While my companion was out in the world of electronic music, I was sitting at home with my wooden guitar writing little two- or three-minute songs, which we were able to benefit from when making Riot on an Empty Street." He pauses. "That’s the very short answer."

Riot on an Empty Street (Astralwerks) is the Quiet follow-up the Kings quietly released last summer, and to the degree that hushed meditations about listening to music and missing a lover and a bearded man paddling in his canoe are a positive, Bøe’s commitment to the mundane has benefitted the Kings. As always with the group, the album is focused on the songwriters’ close harmonies and intricate guitar interplay. The sound is mostly minimal and uncluttered; if it’s not quite assertive enough to justify Quiet’s title — indeed, Empty Street is much more apt — it nonetheless captures the gentle, persistent rhythms of everyday life.

The strategy Øye and Bøe pursue as songwriters is to sketch out an incomplete story and allow the music to fill it in. In "Cayman Islands," Bøe sings, "If only they could see, if only they had been here/They would understand how someone could have chosen to go the length I’ve gone." We can’t see and we weren’t there, but the delicate twirl of acoustic arpeggios helps us understand the depth of his feeling. It’s an elegant union of words and music that can be achieved only by sitting at home with a wooden guitar and waiting for your partner to exhaust his frequent-flier miles and tire of all-night parties.

Which isn’t to underestimate Øye’s contribution to Empty Street. Part of what makes the album so likable is his expansive palette of sounds. "Sorry or Please" has a cool half-time trap-kit beat and a string section sawing away behind the acoustic guitars. "I’d Rather Dance with You" is a terrific spot of organic folk disco, with Øye telling a lover that despite his refined library-nerd looks, "I haven’t read a single book all year." Two songs feature guest vocals by Leslie Feist, a Canadian singer-songwriter who released the excellent Let It Die in Europe last year. Øye met Feist in Berlin, where he lives when he’s not working with Bøe in Bergen; her breathy singing supplies the hint of sex that the Kings rarely conjure on their own.

The subtle bits of humor, too, seem to be Øye’s doing. On the opening "Homesick," they address the Simon and Garfunkel comparisons that get lobbed their way by playing two guys at work who can’t "stop listening to the sound of two soft voices blended in perfection" — even if "I’ll lose some sales and my boss won’t be happy." And over a sort of Scandinavian bossa nova in "Stay Out of Trouble," they take their miserable-student mien just past the point of delicious self-parody. "I wish I had your scarf still," they sigh, "that once embraced and kept me warm."

"We’re very different personalities," Bøe says of the collaboration. "But one of the few things that we have in common is this very strong awareness about music, this shared taste. It affects the consistency of our music; we have this mutual understanding of what a good song is and what a bad song is. We argue a lot, but it’s always about details. On the bigger questions, we always agree."


Issue Date: February 25 - March 3, 2005
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