Elias Rønnenfelt: Heavy Glory album review

Has there been a cooler Dane than Elias Rønnenfelt? His gang Ice age originally debuted as a group of brooding teens making rough hardcore in 2011 before essentially morphing into Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Jr. about a decade ago. Since that shift, Rønnenfelt has taken great pleasure in embracing the lost art of the rockstar persona. Licentiousness and excess are now his muses; his songs often talk about a desire for drugs and lust as a drug, sometimes in one way or another same time. “After all, I think it’s clear that I’m God’s favorite,” he once said sang with convincing confidence. Although vulnerability still occasionally surfaces in his music, he amplifies that pain and heartbreak so much that those songs could also function as Rimbaud poems.

So who is Rønnenfelt outside of the band and the band members he has been playing with for 16 years, since he was 16 years old? Heavy gloryhis first solo album, provides one answer: it’s a portrait of a world-weary man simply trying to find his way through a less friendly landscape and new love. It’s all there in the opening track “Like Lovers Do”: a twangy acoustic guitar and a shuffling drum beat, with Rønnenfelt describing the kind of depraved character that is a classic in his songwriting, under the guise of a beer hall sing-along that hides something darker in his songwriting. cheerful rhythm. Yet the real shock comes at the end, when he asks the song’s subject to step away from that and “spin me around/like lovers do.” His directness and sincerity are unexpected: no hedonism in his desire, only tenderness. “Anyone who’s not close to you / Ain’t no friend of mine / I just wanna be close to you,” he later sings on “Close.” A blunt, almost pleading honesty has crept into his songwriting. Is it an odd fit? It’s certainly unexpected. But it’s an attitude he fully leans into, creating a romanticism that opens new depths in both his lyrics and his singing.

Country and Americana are the common threads throughout the album (although without ever invoking a specific era or time); The flying burrito brothers are now as much a reference point for his sound as The gun club. The stylistic inspiration is fitting for an album that was created largely on the road in 2022, when Rønnenfelt played venues across Europe, often writing songs in one night and debuting them the next day. This solo project is an opportunity for Rønnenfelt to break away from the brutality of his main group: If Find shelter was Iceage at its most glorious and monumental, Heavy glory is the counterbalance, an attempt to find beauty in the small and isolated. “Soldier Song” is idolatry, an early one Leonard Cohen pastiche, right down to the finger-picked guitars and mournful cello. ‘River of Madeleine’, the sparsest song on the album, balances at a low point against the quiet pride that you have managed to survive for a while. What might have been a great tragedy with his other band, becomes here – with its circular, sparkling piano riff – perhaps the most beautiful thing Rønnenfelt has ever created.