Entertainment | 3/22/2005

By Kevin Greenberg

"It's meant to be an ironic comment on modern society," Erlend Oye says of the name of his band, Kings of Convenience. Things today tend to be made cheaply and not to last, he adds, whether it's a song cobbled together in ProTools or a building hastily assembled by the lowest-bidding architectural office.

Kings of Convenience seeks to avoid such quick fixes. Together with Erik Glambek Boe, Oye has spent the last several years crafting three considered albums of hushed, impressionistic folk songs that strive to embody a timeless quality.

"One of the main values of our music is that we're thinking what the album will sound like the 10th time you listen to it, not just the first," Oye notes, brushing his shaggy reddish hair back from his enormous spectacles with a bony hand.

The Kings' music, while informed by the uniquely American singer-songwriter tradition responsible for spawning greats such as Simon and Garfunkel, nonetheless has its own dark sparkle - a kind of briny, European sadness. There's an intangible complexity bubbling below the surface, perhaps born of the range of sounds that influence the duo's music.

Maybe it has something to do with their Norwegian heritage. After all, Oye and Glambek Boe are products of a Continental culture where acoustic indie-pop can peacefully coexist with electronic dance music - a notion that hasn't gained much of a foothold on this side of the Atlantic. Oye resides in Berlin, a Mecca for electronic music, and the influence of his adopted home is evident on his surprisingly successful "DJ Kicks!" mix CD of last year, which presented a hip selection of cutting-edge dance music from taste-making labels such as Kompakt and Perlon. The disc was especially hailed by the indie-rock community, which despite a lot of seemingly progressive posturing, is reliably mistrustful of the new, especially if it eschews guitars.

"I think people in America who listen to indie rock just need to have a familiar name and face to grab onto," Oye speculates, when asked if it was his intent to usher indie fans toward electronic music. "In Europe, it's not such a big deal."

Despite Oye's fondness for dance music, his work with Glambek Boe is a different affair: earnest, almost entirely acoustic, and despite its seeming simplicity, deceptively complex.

"Most of our efforts go into songwriting," Oye insists. "It takes three years on average for us to perfect a single song."

The duo's emphasis on craftsmanship is evident on its last album, "Riot on an Empty Street," released last year on Astralwerks. More complex than its first outings, "Riot on an Empty Street" introduced a mature, sophisticated sound - expanded instrumentation (including a few moments of polite drumming), novel tempos and haunting female vocals from Leslie Feist of Broken Social Scene.

Feist was a welcome presence on stage during the final few songs of the Kings' SXSW performance at Antone's on Saturday night. The capacity crowd kept the networking to a whisper in deference for the duo, who shuffled through a suite of songs from its past albums, in addition to an oddly haunting cover of Tom Petty's "Free Falling." Oye, whose surprisingly hammy showmanship was in stark contrast to the introversion of the music, invoked audience participation on several songs, with mixed results. Finger-snapping is all well and good, but when called upon to sing, the mixed crowd of industry-types and hipsters mumbled its way through the plaintive chorus of "The Build-Up" with the awkwardness of an atheist at an Easter Sunday church service. But being called upon to perform did not dampen the crowd's enthusiasm in the end, a testament that even in these weary times that intelligence and subtlety can still occasionally win out over novelty and (what else?) convenience.