Iceage, "Plowing Into the Field of Love"
October 21, 2014
Courtesy of Tumblr.
Iceage’s new Plowing Into the Field of Love is sure to distance many fans, angered by a discontinuity of the gothic aggression and nihilist ambitions of earlier You’re Nothing and New Brigade.
Idle spectators will, wrongly, reject Plowing for “neo-folk” assumptions, alienating theatrics, or overly inserted egoism. But, in Plowing everything that solidified their position as “saviors of punk rock” – from the New York Times to Pitchfork alike ÛÒ returns.
Plowing is similarly conditioned by the previous albums’ emotions ÛÒ fear, anger, anxiety and so on ÛÒ but in a centered strategy, directly aimed at the listener. While before, tracks were fragmented and chaotic, in Plowing they are singularly confrontational with the listener; there is an audience and a performance, in the middle is a self-reflected stage ÛÒ all shaped by lead Elias Ronnenfelt.
Elias’s position in all this ÛÒ as protagonist or antagonist ÛÒ is ambiguous and fluid, irrationally constituting subjectivity. A pervasive sense of ambivalence to the listener, industry and performance surrounds Plowing. By playing with the role of the lead, Elias decenters one’s impression of the normal musical act. And as fluid identity ÛÒ changing with track ÛÒ Elias confronts the audience with unorthodox narration.
The economical, normal and linear regression of narration is compromised by an aesthetics of distancing. One doesn’t find emotional identification on Plowing, instead a ruptured provocation. As epic theatre, Elias converts passive spectators to critically-reflected subjects; complacency is not an option to the listener, instead listeners are encountered by radical decentering.
This is not a coming of age story’ or the mundane journalists call of maturity,’ but a rejection of normal narration in itself ÛÒ ambivalence surrounds Plowing that reactionary opinions will notice and oppose.
The author is dead, Elias is merely an image, replicated by the satire of living subjectivity in a world of alienation. He is noticeably suffering from the angst of existing within an environment while ironically being popular and accessible. His response: frustrate current paradigms of normativity.
Far from the days of refuting allegations of Nazi sympathizing, the new turn by Iceage marks an international moment; embodying a global agenda by inclusions of archetypically west iconography (wing tips, Budweiser, Neil Young), Plowing continues their popularity through the same confrontational militancy. If Elias was reading Bataille during You’re Nothing, now he’s reading Brecht in Berlin; confronted with the paradox of, both, a passive audience of idle spectators and a culture industry of consumerism, Elias suitably answers post-industrialism with homoeroticism.
On “Forever” (Iceage’s newest anthem and, maybe, their best yet) Elias incites, “I always had the sense that I was split in twoÛ_to shift between existence, to long for the better one.” A split subjectivity, condition of schizophrenia, pure and literal alienation all embody Elias. “If I could dive into the other, like it was an oceanÛ_I’d lose myself forever.” Estranged, wholly and subjectively, Elias is as disoriented as he is fixated; an intangible object appears on his horizon, incapable of grasping, while fully disillusioned.
In Plowing, Iceage expands territory towards an international sound without national character. Copenhagen has been the sight of major post-industrial conditioning of music. Lower, Communions, Holograms (Stockholm), VÌ´r, Lust for Youth are all confined to the movement Iceage created; a collective not solely united in national character, but by a noise in opposition.
Their critique implies a world in which independent music has been restricted to lucid tenets; indeterminable anger and frustration is visible – antagonizing a consumer culture driven by an alienated industry. Within all provocative music, there is a call for a radical response. But for now, Iceage will continue to aggressively negate the overwhelming passivity and indifference that contaminates independent music.
RIYL: Lower, Marching Church, Holograms, Neil Young
Recommended Tracks: 1, 4, 8, 11, 12
