120 Days

[Smalltown Supersound/Vice; 2006]

Norway’s 120 Days are proponents of the house-of-cards style of songwriting– from ephemeral elements, they build towering edifices that seem a breath away from toppling. But those structures never topple, thanks to the band’s deft hands and measured pace, not to mention the loaded deck from which they’re drawing: New Order synths doppler over Kraftwerk’s motorik throb. Primal Scream’s propulsive electro-rock tangles with Neu!’s gridded tableaux and Ådne Meisfjord’s Bonoesque voice. If it sounds overstated, it is– these guys go big on everything, from the long transitions to the incandescent crescendos. But whether they’re hunkered down in a patient whirr or exploding in a fountain of sparks, 120 Days exude audacity, and their U.S. debut’s ambition is ratified by its realization.

Some albums work best as sweeping gestures, others as collections of finely wrought details; this one profits from close attention to both. The stately nine-minute burner "Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone)" is a tsunami of supple polyrhythms, ectoplasmic synths, and tightly spiraling guitars, moving over inclines and declivities so immaculately graded you scarcely notice them until you’re at the crest. "C-Musik" spends nearly two minutes setting a murkily glittering stage before the clattering percussion and space-age melody snap on like spotlights, illuminating the dramatic action in medias res. And epic closing track "I’ve Lost My Vision (Kraut #1)" moves like a time-lapsed ice age, a momentous pageant of melt and drift. There’s just as much to admire at the atomic level– how a chiseled synth snarl in "Be Mine" launches a contrasting bass thwack; the way the Joy Division-style rock of "Get Away" and the springy electro of "Keep on Smiling" are ingeniously bridged with a vivid yet amorphous lump of noise; the power-saw lead that pushes "Lazy Eyes" just over the top.

Still hardwired into rock is the idea that too much technology effaces the human, a notion that modern electronic rock often endorses with paranoid futurism (cue Radiohead)– as if the mere existence of samplers portended an inevitable post-human dystopia. 120 Days unravel the ideological tapestry back to its first stitch, where someone figured out how to build a machine that made beautiful sounds. From this clear-sighted starting point, there’s no urge to mine the seams where technology fails or to subvert it for meta-commentary– it’s simply a sound source capable of mimetically bolstering Meisfjord’s deeply human longings. This is a band that spent a year living and creating in a motor home parked in prohibitively expensive Oslo, because that’s where the music was. They wanted something and, more importantly, weren’t afraid to be perceived as wanting it, and when Meisfjord sings, "In a trance, in a trance I could dance this night away" on the cavernous "Sleepwalking", you can discern it all– the cold wind howling around the motor home, the heat of the band’s desire, the special urgency common to young people pursuing lofty ideals, and the conviction that all this technology has the potential to amplify, not suppress, the transmission of human emotion, should humans be courageous enough to try.

Posted to by Brian Howe on October 16, 2006.