One of my life goals is to spend time living in a Scandinavian country for at least a year, which hopefully I will get closer to in 2012 – so in honour of this ebullient goal, today’s album is “Oh Land” by Oh Land (or Nanna Øland Fabricius as she is known to her friends and family). 2011 was a fairly big year for Scandinavian ladies of pop (check out this nice link of the best Swedish videos of 2011) – with both Björk and Lykke Li releasing albums, and Robyn still storming her way through American hearts and minds.
Oh Land’s album follows in this Nordic tradition – there’s the kookiness and peppiness found on a Peter, Björn and John or Acid House Kings album, mixed with the endearing way she pronounces words with her Danish accent (most obvious when there’s a ‘s’ or ‘z’ in the word). Early on, “Son of a Gun” is probably the closest thing to a traditional pop tune, and the opening few bars owe quite a debt to American R n B as well as the too-perfect-for-words rhyme on “Perfection”:
“I will follow you, you will be my main direction
I study you until I will get your
Everything you do is a gem in my collection
I follow you until I will get your perfection”
Or is it the definitive, pounding beat vying with the swooping, ethereal chorus making that song so right?
Despite the sweetness of Oh Land’s vocals and melodies, there’s something slightly spooky about each of the songs on the album – which reaches a peak once we’ve arrived at “Voodoo” with its shift from pop to electro-pop and on into the Bond-theme-esque grandiosity of “Lean”, the mythical, magical “Wolf and I” and “Human” and the swirling, sweeping, dream-remembering “White Nights”. There’s a feeling of otherworldliness in these songs, or at least a space without time – as if the boundaries of each have been elasticated beyond the horizon. For you are the wolf, and I am the moon…
It’s the mixture of light and shade that she does very well – the music is sweet but the lyrics and themes are bitter or scary or there’s a sense of something unknown (sometimes fascinating, sometimes tragic, all kismet-heavy) approaching from just outside our consciousness. “And I feel like running, and I feel no pain/ I feel like running / When I'm lost within my frame” and “I am walking in my sleep/Living in a state between” which then reaches a resolution on “Helicopter” with Oh Land chasing after her dreams, her hopes and fate from within a helicopter.
We come back to earth on “We Turn It Up” – following our floating about the ether, we’ve managed to find ourselves on a bedroom-dancefloor with our hands pushing the ceiling and making ‘big box-little box’. The couple of times I’ve heard this song it’s reminded me of Sia’s “Clap Your Hands” from her 2010 album “We Are Born” (sidenote: it was interesting to read Oh Land has opened for Sia on her US tour in 2011.)
The album’s final track is “Rainbow” – there’s a definite Radiohead feeling to this song, and that's not just from the Stephen Hawking-like opening vocal – which is a nice way to end the album; it seems to sum up the previous contrariness of the album “nothing’s fast or slow” . It’s both a song where Oh Land is seducing a lover, as well as making a stand on her own, leaving us with more questions than answers – almost like a rainbow which never seems to end, and always offering us the elusive hope of gold.
The nice thing about this album - despite the fact that if someone sat me in a room and played this to me for the first time with no internet or album art to consult, I would reach the conclusion that Oh Land came from a Northern European country of long, open summer days and curious, dark, interminable winter nights – is that each song stands on its own, each song encompasses something different and unique to capture the imagination.
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