{"id":6252,"date":"2022-11-03T01:22:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/?p=6252"},"modified":"2022-10-31T21:05:26","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T20:05:26","slug":"morning-songiceage-shake-the-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/2022\/11\/03\/morning-songiceage-shake-the-feeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning song#Iceage #Shake the Feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After last year\u2019s\u00a0Seek Shelter<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Iceage<\/a>\u2019s operatic and classic-rock adjacent turn, a collection of outtakes seems only fitting.\u00a0Seek Shelter\u00a0<\/em>was stuffed to the brim with ideas: the epic \u201cShelter Song,\u201d power pop on \u201cDear Saint Cecilia,\u201d gothic despair on \u201cLove Kills Slowly.\u201d It wasn\u2019t the first Iceage album to show their range (2014\u2019s\u00a0Plowing into the Field of Love<\/a><\/em>\u00a0really opened the floodgates) but it had the best production value and the most sophisticated presentation. It emphasized what we\u2019ve known from the start: Iceage takes rock music very seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frontman Elias Bender R\u00f8nnenfelt sings less with technical skill than with blind faith, like he\u2019s trying to break open quagmires of meaning and doesn\u2019t quite care how he gets there. More often than not, he and the band manage to find the bones of a great song, whatever mood it conveys. Shake the Feeling<\/em>, a collection of outtakes and rarities collected from a six-year period leading up to Seek Shelter<\/em>, holds up against any of their studio LPs. The only songs that clearly belong on an outtakes collection are a cover of Abner Jay\u2019s \u201cMy Mule,\u201d a traveling song that feels like a joke with R\u00f8nnenfelt\u2019s bellowed drunk-Ian Curtis delivery, and \u201cLockdown Blues,\u201d a thin COVID rocker (though it\u2019s worth a tip of the hat to a modern rock song about quarantine that\u2019s neither ironic nor sentimental).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll the Junk On the Outskirts\u201d and the title track kick things off with dense mid-tempo energy, in the vein of Beyondless<\/a><\/em>. In the album\u2019s other cover, Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ll Keep it With Mine\u201d, R\u00f8nnenfelt makes explicit what\u2019s always been there in Iceage: a love of Dylan\u2019s drawn-out vocal poetry. But there are flashes of the early band\u2019s punk abandon, too. \u201cSocipath Boogie\u201d sounds exactly like its title, and slaps. \u201cBalm of Gilead<\/a>\u201d is by turns sludgy, searing and sneering, recalling the best tracks on You\u2019re Nothing<\/a><\/em>. \u201cBroken Hours\u201d lurches in and out of half time while a piano rings like a train station bell, a whirlwind of chaos in a glass bottle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the punk rock energy is still present here, R\u00f8nnenfelt approaches the music from a poetic standpoint at the end of the day. Nowhere is that more evident than the closer, an acoustic version of last year\u2019s spellbinding \u201cShelter Song,\u201d one of the band\u2019s best tracks to date. It\u2019s a song that sounds better bigger, but the acoustic version gives a welcome look at the folk-inspired skeleton. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken as a whole,\u00a0Shake the Feeling\u00a0<\/em>is a reassuring reminder: Iceage still has no shortage of ideas, and they\u2019re only getting better at executing them in contained bursts. If they can wrangle a record this good from these \u201cmisfit children\u201d (as R\u00f8nnenfelt terms the outtakes here), there\u2019s no telling what heights they\u2019ll reach next.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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