Doubters need look no further than Erlend Øye to see that nerd chic is in. Hiding behind coke-bottle glasses in every photo and struggling to express his thoughts on everything from pop culture to politics in vaguely broken English, he fits the stereotype of a quiet, self-conscious intellectual easily. Except he is a rock star.

That is, if the duo Kings of Convenience can be called a rock band. Øye and his bandmate Eirik Glambek Bøe limit themselves almost exclusively to two voices and two acoustic guitars. Although the product sounds more like singer-songwriter folk music than anything else, Øye is hesitant to strictly classify the duo’s sound. In true nerd fashion, he intellectualizes the Kings’ music, saying, “We’re trying to do music that we like, which is a mixture of many different things, with only acoustic guitar.”

Even playing with Bøe takes on an experimental quality for Øye, especially since the two no longer live in the same city. After making their 2001 record Quiet Is the New Loud in their hometown of Bergen, Norway, Kings of Convenience went on an unofficial hiatus before recording their latest album, Riot on an Empty Street, in 2004. In the interim period, Bøe stayed in Norway to finish his psychology studies, while Øye moved to Berlin and worked on several dance albums, contributing vocals to Royksopp’s Melody A.M., remixing Kings material, producing his own album Unrest, and releasing an album as part of the DJ Kicks series.

“Eirik and I are very different in our choice of life,” Øye explains. “If you think about it musically, there’s always an evolvement of one of us to a new way of music. There are always new things to learn about the other person and the way they play.”

One would assume that Øye’s musical sensibilities would have changed quite a bit over the last three years, as his DJ work is stylistically far removed from the beat-free Kings of Convenience. But Øye views his various projects as completely separate entities, with each one offering him more musical opportunities to explore. “I try to keep them all in the other corner of the room from each other,” he says. “Kings of Convenience is completely the opposite [of my solo work], yin and yang, electronic versus acoustic. I want Kings of Convenience to be what it is. I don’t want it to sound like my other projects.”

The release of a new Kings album gives Øye the chance to return to the United States for a tour, which includes two dates in New York. “I heard that New York in the snow is the most dramatic place in the world,” he says excitedly, and with a touch of irony, as he has seen enough bad weather in Norway to last several lifetimes. “Bergen is the rain capital of Scandinavia. There are nights when there’s just no point in going out, so it’s quite easy to focus on music,” he says, “so there’s a big chunk of [Norwegian] music coming from Bergen.”

Although he no longer lives in Norway, Øye still feels that Kings of Convenience is entrenched in the Scandinavian pop music scene, which has experienced an explosion in the last few years, bringing us artists like Magnet, the Hives, and Øye’s personal favorite, Jens Lekman. “I knew a lot of these bands before, and I keep meeting them anyway, in hotel lobbies and bars,” he says.

Kings of Convenience is bringing more than just its music to the States, it’s also bringing a political message. Even though the group’s gentle sound is as far from the inflammatory rock music of today’s political rebellion as the opinions of the red states are from those of the blue states, Øye has a lot he wants to say to America this year, most of it regarding November’s election. “We are really wondering why and how you are doing this. Where do you get the information to make you think [four more years of Bush] is a good idea?” As politically informed as anyone in the States, he sees it as his duty to bring us the European perspective that we do not get from what he refers to disdainfully as the “60 word news articles in USA Today.”

Øye and his compatriot will have to figure out how to pick our collective political brain while still providing a strong musical experience on this tour. But for someone who can hold his own in every genre from folk to dance remixes, that shouldn’t be too hard.