Iceage

Danish post-rock, past-punk, all-roll ‘n soul group Iceage ((Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Johan Suurballe Wieth, Jakob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen, Casper Morilla) commemorate the last seven years with compilation album ‘Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021’.

These tracks are simply more than flotsam, debris and off-cuts though, their non-chronological ordering here producing a chrono-logical bordering document, a set of aural postcards from bygone jaunts, past pleasures, yesterday’s year zeroes pumped with renewed vigour.

This is a group that has caught the ears and hearts of their inspirations such as Richard Hell and Iggy Pop, channelling their street-level disaffectedly drawled observations of society’s miscreants, the outcasts, the no-hopers, the fringe-hangers and celebrating and elevating them in song.

The two covers selected, the gnarly “I’ll keep it with mine” by Bob Dylan and Abner Jay’s “My Mule” fit seamlessly into the quartet’s own unique skewed-skronk and rough-hued bruised-blues honk. The latter especially has excitable echoes of the late, great Jonathan Fire*Eater (1993 – 1998).

Unlike the manicured affectations of fencing-school poseurs The Strokes, these primal wails and squeals from between the gut(ter) and the stars pluck the negative anguish from the ether and manipulate it into positive anger.

‘Shake the feeling’ echoes Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth’s explorations in the places and spaces that exist and between noise and sound, a proto-punk panoply of the freeing of psychic shackles, exorcising the existential embers, a clearing of the decks.

‘Sociopath Boogie’ extracts the feel of Eddie Cochran’s seasonal antipathy and mangles it, screws it up and throws it straight in the bin. Pinpoint punk attitude meets raffish rebel rock.

‘Namouche’ is a scratchy punk-funk delight, like The Method Actors or Pylon freestyling, a no-wave goodbye, say hello.

As a way to reboot, release and recharge, Iceage prove that by freeing their so-called ‘misfits’ they are looking forwards, onwards, towards new horizons.