By: ChartAttack.com
Staff
by Brian Wong
When you coo in hushed tones about love and loss, gently
plucking at
acoustic guitars and in effect become purveyors of a soft-pop movement
that began with your acclaimed debut album, Quiet Is The New Loud, you
tend to appear slight — especially when you're from a country known for
its black metal.
Yet even though the Norwegian duo of ErlendØye
and Eirik Glambek Bøe
play songs that are decidedly twee, their soft revolution in the face
of Goliaths who push for ear-splitting concert volumes shouldn't be
mistaken for timidity. The self-proclaimed Kings Of Convenience write
introspective music for non-introverts.
"I'm not shy and Erlend is the least shy person I know,"
remarks the
scruffy Bøe, sitting at a diner in Toronto sans his skinnier,
geekier,
red-headed partner,Øye, who is feeling under the weather.
"[Erlend
will] go into a cafe and sit beside a person he doesn't know and start
a conversation with them. He knows people in every city we go to
because he met them the first time we played a show there."
One city where Bøe andØye happened to have
a momentous encounter a
couple years ago was in Berlin — except the meeting didn't occur at
their show; it was at Leslie Feist's.
"Me and Erlend went to see her show in Berlin where she
was living
at the time," Bøe explains. "She played in a tiny club and it
was
basically a solo performance; I was just blown away. I've seen so many
people play guitar and sing and rarely get so touched. She just had
something very special."
So the Kings invited the soon-to-be-celebrated Canadian
chanteuse to
record vocals for a couple songs on their latest disc, Riot On An Empty
Street, which featured last year's sleeper single "I'd Rather Dance
With You." Of course, the record is a quiet riot: light bossanova
rhythms and delicate campfire strumming meet some dainty piano, elegiac
strings and the bare harmonies of Simon And Garfunkel, the band the
Kings get compared to the most. And Feist lends her translucent coo to
the outros of the sprightly "Know-How" and the moody album closer "The
Build-Up." It's almost a perfect match-up given that Feist's own Let It
Die disc and Riot both hold a torch for acoustic soft pop with a hint
of danceable soul.
"We're very much in the same frame of mind, musically,"
Bøe says.
Following this past winter's successful North American
club tour — a
challenging feat considering that they're accustomed to playing in
European theatres rather than bustling bars — the Kings plan to do some
songwriting for their next album.
Meanwhile, Bøe himself will continue his
involvement in local
politics in Bergen, where fellow Norwegian artists like Röyksopp
and
Annie also call home. With his heavy interests in city planning,
Bøe
uses Toronto's College West as an example of an area with "mixed
functions."
"People can live here, then go to a cafe on the street
and there are
people walking in the streets," he muses. "There's a community feeling,
whereas in other cities it seems like they're planned by making one
part of the city a residential part and another part the commercial and
financial district — and you'll have a big highway and everyone has to
drive a car to get from one part to the other.
"A lot of American cities, with a few exceptions, are
planned around
the automobile," Bøe continues. "In those kinds of cities I tend
to
feel kind of alienated."