Årabrot - Who Do You Love (Pelagic Records) 2018
8
It’s all too easy to compare Kjetil Nernes to iconoclasts gone by – there’s certainly plenty of Nick Cave’s fire-and-brimstone sermonising and Tom Waits’ flair for baffling narratives on offer on Who Do You Love – but it feels like Årabrot’s strongest connection to such heavyweights is just their sheer perversity, an almost innate ability to avoid classification.
This latest collection is both high-concept and immediately infectious, blunt but impossibly detailed, and it’s simultaneously the heaviest and most accessible thing they’ve ever created. From The Dome’s craggy soundscapes right through to Sons And Daughter, a truer audio counterpart to Twin Peaks than any jazz-noir band could hope to create, this is an art-rock album in the truest sense of the term – a vast tableau as impressive when taken as a whole as a collection of individual components.