I’ll admit that I haven’t been listening to music so much as playing it since I picked up my bass guitar, so I’m going to fall back on a band used to help seed my original exploration, Kælan Mikla, a three-piece band from Reykjavík, Iceland.
I’m not sure how I stumbled onto the band. I think I was boob-tubing on the YouTube one afternoon between work and cooking dinner, probably looking for some video game to get excited about. When I do that on the big television via a streaming box, the app likes to mix in my musical interests from YouTube Music.
The band members were intriguing in the still (for what was their song Nornalagið), just the right amount of post-punk appearance and not so far as gothic looking. I shrugged. I had nothing better to do at the time and I’ve had worse reasons to give a band a listen than “they are my kind of attractive”. The worst that would happen? I would lose a minute or two of my life and stop playback. No harm, no foul, right?
Within moments, I was instantly hooked. This, I said to myself, is the natural progression of the sound I loved and played growing up. It was as if, in an alternate universe, Lalapalooza had never happened (I think I’ve placed that series of festivals as the turning point where alternative music became mainstream in my mind). Kælan Mikla had found the next progressive step without feeling regressive to my modern ear.
To make matters better, I happened to be hardcore studying Northern European traditions and rune symbolism at the time and had just enough background in Old Norse and Icelandic language to tease out gist of the meaning without wholly resorting to translations.
One of the things that I really like about their sound is the mixture of shrieks on some of their songs mixed with the singing. It gives them a feral quality to their sound — along with the frequent themes of magic, shamanism and Old Way references.
While I can find other songs that I like better, I think this might be one of the more accessible songs for the uninitiated.
Translation of “Nightflowers”, as provided by the band’s webpage:
The night suits us best
We wake up when the sun goes down
When midwinter is at its’ darkest
The nightflowers shine the brightest
And they do it although we won’t find them here
Because the ripped themselves up by the roots
And now they’re standing on two feet
And bloom in the lady that’s dancing next to me
In many ways, this is absolutely the sound I am trying to work towards discovery on. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
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