Dave Simpson 

Iceage: Plowing Into the Field of Love review – a gloriously untamed row

The Copenhagen band teeter thrillingly on the edge of chaos with a rampage through debauchery and redemption, writes Dave Simpson
  
  

Iceage
Deranged glee … Iceage Photograph: PR

Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt isn’t the type of chap you’d invite round to meet your mum. The 21-year-old slurs like Mark E Smith and spews out such misanthropic lyrics as “I don’t care whose house is on fire as long as I can warm my hands against the blaze.” Still, it’s quite an inferno, as the Copenhagen band leap from the punky roar of their first two albums into music that teeters thrillingly on the edge of chaos. There are gigantic rolling rhythms, marauding riffs, trumpets, violas, guitars and drums. Rønnenfelt rampages through tales of debauchery, sin and redemption – plus at least one instance of administering champagne to an animal – with deranged glee. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ literary lyrical language and guttural rumble are writ large over these stories of maladies, manacles and “horehounds”, while standout Abundant Living’s alcohol-by-gaslight tales are on more than first-name terms with the Pogues. Still, in otherwise safe-as-houses 2014, it’s refreshing to find a young band channelling such influences into such a gloriously untamed row.

 

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