WHEN SAINTS GO MACHINE play XOYO after a storming sellout show at Concrete and joyful reception of their new album, INFINITY POOL, out now on K7 records.

Plus support from FACE & HEEL and LOVED ONES
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When Saints Go Machine are a hard band to pin down, four young men doing things with electro pop that no one has done before.
The Danish four-piece formed in 2007 — Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild (vocals), Jonas Kenton (keyboards), Simon Muschinsky (keyboards) and Silas Moldenhawer (drums) — are a complicated mix of influences. There’s dance music in there, for sure, but also post punk, some experimental electronica in the Aphex Twin mould, and, crucially, a healthy dose of pop. You could describe the end result as a heady mix of Caribou, The Knife/Fever Ray and Arthur Russell. But, really, it doesn’t sound like anything else out there.
One of the clichés about Scandinavian countries is that they are neat and tidy, well ordered, clean. The same could not be said of Copenhagen four-piece When Saints Go Machine’s second full-length album, ‘Infinity Pool’. The opposite, in fact. It’s a record born out of an atmosphere of chaos. Frontman Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild explains: “We tried to record this album in a summer house in the country, like we did with the last one, but it didn’t feel right. We also tried going into a big studio to record the sketches that we made, but that didn’t work either. In the end we figured out that doing things at home, separately, a more chaotic approach, was how we were supposed to record this music.”

Which is not to say that the result is disjointed. It’s harder, darker and more synthetic than its predecessors. It opens with ‘Love And Respect’, which features a guest vocal from Grammy award winning rap artist Killer Mike, who freewheels over chugging, synth-drenched beat. “I guess people will be surprised there’s a rapper on the album,” says Vonsild. “We just did a song that we felt needed a rap verse. In order to keep making music we have to surprise ourselves. If we stop doing that we’ll have to stop making music.” Elsewhere, ‘Dead Boy’ sees Vonsild’s tremulous falsetto digitized and then floated over a semi-ambient soundscape, while ‘Infinity Killer’ pitches skittering sound effects against a low-end drone.

It’s more unapologetically electronic than anything the band have done before. “On the previous album, ‘Konkylie’, we tried to make machines simulate nature,” says Vonsild. “With ‘Infinity Pool’ we were trying to capture a feeling of the absurdity of mankind trying to construct nature. Maybe it’s something to do with being in the city. You are always influenced by what’s going on around you.”

It’s also to do with the music that inspired them. “There are a lot of references to the early ’90s on the album,” says Vonsild. “It’s not a rave album, but there are a lot of elements of rave on there. ‘Degeneration’ sums up what we were trying to do. There are some tracks on the album that could almost have been rave songs under other circumstances. I think that it’s one of the songs that I don’t think anyone else would have made.”

Rather than go at these rave influences full tilt, they did the opposite of what might be expected: they stripped them down and twisted them into new shapes. “Yeah, especially on ‘Degeneration’, there are very few instruments and nothing happens really,” explains Vonsild. “We tried to pick away layers. But generally most of our productions consist of a lot of layers in each song. I think the initial difference between those two albums are, that with ‘Konkylie’ each of those layers almost fought to get the most attention. Whereas this time we tried to make a lot sound a lot immediate and simple. This album is slower and harder. There are a lot of tracks with no drums, but when there are drums they play an important part in the song. But it still has this longing feeling.”

It’s that “longing feeling” that’s the glue that holds the album together, the thing that lets you know it’s a When Saints Go Machine record. Vonsild pauses, reflectively: “I think that’s our trademark. Longing for something.”

He won’t say exactly what. As ever, Vonsild and the band are reluctant to talk about lyrical themes, preferring to let the listener work things out for themselves. However, he does talk obliquely about “stuff that’s hard to understand”. He continues: “It seems like people have to get killed for stuff to happen. A tragedy has to happen before people will address an issue. They won’t do it before it happens. I guess it’s nature. That kind of thing can make you mad.”

The dark undercurrent that coloured the band’s previous releases is intact, then. It’s something that makes the fact that When Saints Go Machine won a string of awards in their native Denmark last year all the more surprising. Vonsild is sanguine about that kind of music industry approval. “We won some of the biggest awards in Denmark last year which came as a surprise,” he shrugs, “but it doesn´t really change the way we approach making music or our artistic ideals.”

While it’s nice to be liked, Vonsild says it’s far more important to challenge people as well as yourself. He says they felt nervous about the direction they took on ‘Infinity Pool’, unease that they were operating outside their comfort zone. “But,” he adds, “that’s a good thing. Whenever you feel a bit scared about putting something out, that’s how you should feel as an artist.”

Who would argue with him? It’s certainly paid off here.

SUPPORT FROM

FACE & HEEL

Face + Heel aka Luke Taylor and Sinead McMillan started working together in Jan 2012 and have been gaining plaudits over the last year – despite only having had one release to date – the excellent ‘No Stars EP‘ on Warm Records. Having gained comparisons to acts such as The xx and having been tipped by the Boiler Room founders as the ones to watch last year after their acclaimed live set back in April.

LOVED ONES

Back in 2011 Fierce Panda released Are You Hiding Out In Hell? (hailed by the NME as ‘dubby psyche brilliance’) the first results of a collaboration between Wirral musicians Nik Glover and Rich Hurst under the name of Loved Ones.

The duo have been likened to the Beta Band, and early shows shows with Liars and Django Django marked the band as ones to watch in a developing Merseyside scene that would see artists as disparate as Stealing Sheep, Forest Swords and Bill Ryder-Jones. All of whom were nominated alongside Loved Ones for a new local music prize, the Get Into This Award, dubbed by the national press as the ‘Scouse Mercury Prize’. Loved Ones duly went on to win the award.

Eat Your Own Ears and Junction 2 Music present:

The Quietus “It is Tamikrest who have emerged from the Sahara with the most interesting material … It’s a super sound, with an effortless, yet focused groove.”

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Tamikrest formed in 2006 and are from Kidal, a remote desert town in the northwest of the Sahara, some 2,000 kilometres north of the capital Bamako. The band members are all Tuareg, a group of people that are spread all over North and some of West Africa, i.e. Niger, Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya. Between 1990 and 1995 a fight evolved into a bloody civil war. After the war many of the rebel fighters traded their Kalashnikovs and hand grenades for guitars and microphones. When new riots broke out in 2006, Ousmane Ag Mossa and his friend Cheick Ag Tiglia decided not to fight with weapons, but to call attention to the Tuareg’s cause with musical means.

Tamikrest are often called Tinariwen’s little brothers and there definitely are parallels to draw between these two Saharan bands, but when Tamikrest stepped onto the scene the stakes were raised. Tamikrest take the traditional Tuareg sound and throw their own sound influenced by the likes of Pink Floyd and Dire Straits into the mix. They take generators deep into the desert in search of the perfect synthesis of their traditional ritual drumming and the music of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. Other bands have stepped onto the scene following the success of Tinariwen on the world stage, but it is Tamikrest who hold up the torch and lead the way. Tamikrest’s leader Ousmane Ag Mossa is quick to admit his influences: “When I was young I listened to a lot of traditional Tuareg music as well as Tinariwen. There was no other music..it was only in 2000 that I had access to cassettes of Bob Marley and Dire Straits. That changed my musical vision … Music is just music, no matter where it comes from… My goal is to broaden my horizon step by step.”

With their second album “Toumastin” the young Tuareg rebels create their own universe using even brighter colours. The enchanted ancient mystique of the songs captures the ear immediately, but as the music carries on the band bridges the gap between the African Blues and hypnotic dub, psychedelic funk and an almost supernatural kind of desert garage. The guitars are more offensive, the groove deepens and the Tamaschek chants are merging with the meandering guitar riffs like a caravan voyage through ancient times. “A solid follow-up to consolidate the band’s place at the peak of the rockiest end of the desert blues outcrop.” fRoots. Tamikrest are ready to embrace the future while proudly maintaining the rich tradition of their folk.

Keep your ears to the ground and listen out for their third album which is fast approaching us and set to be released at the end of this Summer. If the last two albums are anything to go by we are in for another spectacular experience of saharan rock and blues “Tamikrest are a relentless, unstoppable force.” MusicOMH

Plus support from TARQ BOWEN

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