Band photos are always unique

This is the debut album of a Danish 4-piece rock band who describe their sound as deriving from the "melodic and energetic 70s and ... the edgy progressive rock of the 90s". On this album this basically translates into average soft rock songs, which are slow and pondering, and then boring emo songs, which make you feel depressed for all the wrong reasons. All the songs are sung in English but the lead singer has a strange pronunciation. Rather than his voice being endearing or interesting like fellow Nordic musicians Björk or Lykke Li, his inability to pronounce 'r's makes him sound like Kim Jong-Il from Team America. Equally his vocal range is pretty poor, which would not in itself be a problem if the band hadn’t written songs like ‘Murder & Circumstances’ with notes he can’t reach.

The ability of the other members of the band is hardly inspiring either. When most of the members band play at least three instruments the phrase 'jack of all trades and master of none' comes to mind. Steve Albini said "if the drummer's awesome even a crappy band is ok", however unfortunately Daniel Pedersen doesn’t raise them above the detritus. Listening to Daniel Pedersen’s repetitive, dull beats are reminiscent of listening to a ticking clock, waiting for a late train to arrive. This also highlights one of the major problems of Vinyl Floor, their songs are all quite long, with most songs over 4 minutes and two being more than 7 minutes, this means that the whole album clocks in at a depressing full hour. I applaud anyone who can manage to listen to the whole thing in one sitting; it was hard enough doing it in three.

Another big issue is the whole unoriginality of the music, one thing that has always made Nordic music interesting is its unique take on different styles of music with bands such as The Knife, more recently JJ or even Abba, however Vinyl Floor are just regurgitating American music. If they had tried something original and it had still been awful it would have been at least interesting. But, to end on a positive note, the artwork is quite nice…

Released 19th September 2009 on Karmanian Records

Words by Adam Saunders