Album Review :: Marching Church - This World Is Not Enough

Marching Church

This World Is Not Enough

March 30 2015 (Posh Isolation)

8.5/10

Words: Linn Branson

Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt imagines a world filled with wealth and women, where he luxuriates in all their glory. Meanwhile, he just has to contend with the production of this, perhaps more everyday, debut album.

With a lineup including Kristian Emdal and Anton Rothstein of Lower, Cæcilie Trier (Choir of Young Believers), Bo H. Hansen (Hand of Dust, Sexdrome) and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary), the Dane was apparently influenced by David Maranha’s experimental droner 'Antarctica', and soulsters James Brown and Sam Cooke. “The whole month of writing and rehearsing and the one week we had in the studio was truly an explosion of ideas,” Rønnenfelt has previously said. “Improvisation, something I have never worked with before, was crucial in the making of this album, considering the loose nature of the writing on some of these songs.”

The resulting eight tracks are, in Rønnenfelt’s words, “songs of nocturnal longing, preposterous self-obsession and cockeyed etiquette.” Well, he's got that right. They are also outrageously magnetic, boldly outlandish, and damnably seductive.

'Hungry For Your Love' is without doubt the highlight pièce-de-résistance, with a whispered Spanish to open, before Rønnenfelt lets rip for the rest of the seven minutes on a pained confessional of his need for a bit of the old lurve. Minimal instrumentation heightens Rønnenfelt’s feelings. Recent single, the Bowie-esque 'King Of Song’ steps away from the sexual 'Hungry For Love', bringing in horns, acoustic strums, and fluttering percussion in a breezy jazz flow, although with Rønnenfelt’s ubiquitous fractured wails ever present punctuating the mix, as similarly portrayed on 'Every Child (Portrait of Wellman Braud)', a reference to the 1920s Creole American jazz bassist; while 'Dark End Of The Street' pays homage to those aforementioned soul references in being a cover of the Percy Sledge classic.

'Living In Doubt', like 'King Of Song', sees the writer as a self-confessed "megalomaniac but with a lot of self-doubt," as a kind of throwback to guy who sang “I do believe I am the Lord’s favorite one…” on the Iceage track of last year. Elsewhere, there's the near nine minutes of 'Up A Hill' and the seven-and-a-half minute 'Your Father's Eyes' - perhaps the most affecting track of the album lyrically, written around a father's abuse of his daughter, and of which Rønnenfelt has said in interview that he had a hard time with:

"I kind of just zoned out, but my fingers kept writing for a little. And I kind of snapped again and read it again, and realized, 'Oh God, is this what the song is about? That’s terrible.' But also kind of beautiful. It’s not sparked by any real story but I think it gives a kind of empathetic view to such a tragedy, because it’s written from the point of view of somebody who wishes they could change things, you know? I do like to bring things to that point of where it’s really on the verge of being too much..."

'This World Is Not Enough' is almost too much as a whole, but drawing back at the last minute, it becomes instead an early contender for album of the year.