120 Days II

Norway has long, unremitting winters with no sunshine, leaving the four lads who make up 120 Days with a lot of time on their hands. This quartet used their time wisely by making music, taking drugs and probably listening to a lot of old Kraftwerk, New Order and Cure records. With three battered keyboards and an old drum machine, the band creates a gloomy, tooth grinding, sinister wall of noise perfect for all-night raves on the dark side of the moon. Like the '80s dance bands and '70s Krautrock groups they obviously admire, they've found a way to make their regimented drum tracks swing, adding layers of thick fuzzy guitar noise and gasping. heart attack bass to provide some rock credibility. Ådne Meisfjord's desperate shrieks of anguish bring to mind Robert Smith's caterwauling at its most frenzied, but good luck understanding the lyrics, which are presumably in English. The vocals are buried deep in the mix, but their incomprehensible shriek exudes a kind of bracing, desperate beauty. 120 Days still lean pretty heavily on their influences: "Come Out, Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone" sounds like Kraftwerk sitting in with Joy Division, "Sleepwalking" is pure Cure and "Keep on Smiling" could be a sexier, more menacing version of Depeche Mode, but their ominous squall is delivered with a frenzied energy that makes their relentless drone promising. [The 2007 reissue included a four-song bonus disc.] ~ j. poet, Rovi