Album Review: Iceage - 'Seek Shelter'

Seek Shelter is an album of contrasts. Sprawling but compact. Sometimes aggressive but often gentle.

Its nine tracks take you on a whistle-stop tour of genres, through post-punk, britpop and indie dance. This could easily have made for a cluttered, confusing album but Iceage dwell just long enough at each destination to tantalise and refresh the ear. Seek Shelter demands your attention and rewards you for bestowing it with layers of nuance that unfold with each listen.

The scant macabre imagery that lingers from previous incarnations is offset by a new sense of faith and optimism, lending hope to the downtrodden rather than sharing in their misery as before. Frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, hitherto known more for his energy than euphony, channels his inner Ian Curtis in singing that “We have nothing but love” and yet “Love kills slowly”. In less capable hands, this might come across as trite but Rønnenfelt’s aching delivery makes it profound.

The Mancunian influence doesn’t stop there. The next track, Vendetta, takes you a few years down the line, swapping post-punk for proto-house. The languorous beat unveiled there borrows heavily from The Stone Roses’ Second Coming and Happy Mondays. Iceage’s fifth coming sees them come of age musically as well as lyrically. The jangly guitars and raw vocals of recent albums still feature heavily but this outing sees them juxtaposed with new musical ideas and textures. It’s surely no coincidence that this is the first Iceage album produced by an outside influence, in the form of Spacemen 3’s Peter Kember.

Seek Shelter is by turns intoxicatingly cosmopolitan and comforting in its familiarity. It’s a fantastic, multifaceted album that imparts something new at every turn. Iceage have evolved from the precocious nihilism of their earlier albums to find a voice as worldly-wise as it is world-weary, imparting simple truths with effortless grace.

Words by Dylan Wilby

---