Kings of Convenience

My first brush with this Norwegian duo was in a friend’s shed five years ago. There they trampled out a path in my memory so distinct that on hearing them again something vague is reaffirmed, acknowledged. Forgive my nostalgia, but such sentiment seems apt for a band that seem to exist contemporaneously with the feeling of a band long since gone.

Small, compact spaces are the perfect place for their acoustic-led sound to fill. Kings of Convenience are designed for solitary listening, or perhaps as a shameless suggestive prelude to some awkward teenage fumbling. So I was pretty anxious when the venues were announced and they would be playing to a packed audience in the same place where I had sat my finals and graduated only a few months ago. Filling the newly rebuilt Butterworth Hall- constructed to hold symphony orchestras (as it would the following day)- would be a hard task. But, to KoC’s and the venue’s credit, the acoustics were perfect; loud enough to fill the air and subtle enough to pick out the delicacies of their vocals. Taxi Taxi’s support provided a perfect set up for the tone of what was to follow. However, they did affirm a personal prejudice that anyone good-looking and Scandinavian will have the voice of an angel.

After a five-year gap Erlend and Eirik have set aside the dance-pop bubbling of their side project The Whitest Boy Alive, reverting back to much-loved, stripped-down, pop songs. Exhibiting a bulk of their new album, Declaration of Dependence, (released in the UK on Monday) with a typically un-planned set, KoC blended new with old faultlessly. A particular highlight would definitely have to be their inspired cover of ‘Waiting in Vain’ in which Erlend’s mouth turned out to be a pretty effective trombone.

This choice of cover seems appropriate for a band that proves how the three-minute pop song still has great potential. This form is hard-wired into our culture to such a great extent we rarely think about its hold on our consciousness. It’s the common sense of Western music; the default mode to which we all switch back to when all else fails. KoC are one of a select few that can tap into this form and strip it down to its bare essentials. There are no pretences, just beautiful, catchy, well-crafted tracks. Still, Erlend and Eirik get bracketed in with the inoffensive dinner-party tripe from the ‘chilled-out’ Jack-the-surfer-twat-Johnson to Florence [plus? and? Ooh aren’t we deep?] the Machine. More fitting contemporary comparisons would be to Stephen Merritt (of The Magnetic Fields) and Jeremy Jay (of… Jeremy Jay).

Judging by the audience’s enraptured aura I wasn’t the only one whose younger years were enriched with KoC. The band gifted everyone a few hours to collectively slip into personal recollection. It’s always moving seeing people moved to tears at gigs and this was no exception; recalling the words of Don Draper on nostalgia:

“It’s delicate, but potent… In Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards, its takes us to a place to where we ache to go again. It lets us travel the way a child travels; round and around and back home again.”

So for a couple of hours this week I was, for better or worse, sixteen; sitting back in a shed in some suburban midway point; albeit with fewer caressing and copulating thirty-something couples.