Norwegian singer-songwriter makes his debut…
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[6.17]
Katherine St Asaph: Isolating the worst part of a crush is sort of like isolating the worst part of being vaporized alive, but the most humiliating part is the asymmetry of it. Barring the kind of horrific confessions no one wants to hear, even from their crushes, or the odds-defying luck to have it both reciprocated and done so without manipulative intent, you’ve fallen into the wrong side of a power play, where someone out there, unknowingly, has usurped your mind into a device for generating imagined impossible conversations or company. It’s at once public and lonely. Online metrics leave a trail back to you, being around people involves all sorts of lovely revealing behavior; if they wanted to, they would have known weeks or months or years ago, and if they didn’t want to, that’s the entire fear. But mostly this takes place in minds and rooms alone. “Glimpse of Hope,” after some dubiously frontloaded Scando Damien Riceisms, depicts the atmosphere there uncannily accurately, somewhere between Vulnicura and Fever Ray. The trap drums suggest impatience; the opera pads and faraway guitars suggest yearning. There’s a fine line between this and stalking, though, and Bech walks close enough to it to distance the listener, though no closer than “Something I Can Never Have” did. (“On the Street Where You Live” didn’t age well either.) But it nails the 2 a.m. loathing, a near-ideal staring-into-contacts-lists-pretending-to-beam-thoughts-through soundtrack. We all need them.
[9]
Scott Mildenhall: The use of Nils Bech’s powerful “Waiting” in the trailer for the most recent series of Skam was inspired, if not entirely consistent with the story it prefaced. It is, however, fairly representative of Bech, and no less than on “Glimpse of Hope”. He’s an idiosyncratic singer with an impressive range, both of which he regularly harnesses to their full in the realisation of his inclination towards emotional exposure like this. Awkward feelings, thoughts and behaviour are presented untidied; stalkerish perambulating and friends’ concern both bluntly denied a metaphor. It’s jarring, and the lack of hedging seems bound to put some people off, but that’s indicative of the greatest thing about it: that, crestfallen in his electronic cathedral of sorrow, Nils Bech would be uncowed.
[9]
Iain Mew: “Glimpse of Hope” is dense and questing, and resists any chance to move away from detail. Complete with intricate electronica and Bech’s falsetto, it has a bit of a feel of a Mew track shrunk down to microchip miniature; the effect is diverting with glimpses of something more.
[6]
Ramzi Awn: Heart is not what is missing from popular music today. Its own walls stumbling down, the authentic arrangement behind “Glimpse of Hope” offers an onslaught of conflicting emotions in its rousing refrain. In the end, the single sounds more contrived than anything else.
[3]
Alfred Soto: This singer “explores the tensions between art and dance” but not between fussy lyrics and singing in any language. Lovely falsetto, though.
[3]
Hannah Jocelyn: For a period of time in 2012, I thought “Run Boy Run” was the coolest song ever; it was essentially Two Steps From Hell with vocals by a cisgender, less confrontational version of Anohni, an artist I had not discovered yet. This has a similar kind of grandeur to “Run Boy Run”, but I like that it’s more personal, not to mention weirder. The occasional clunkiness of the lyrics (“I’ve texted you but still there is no reply/I’ve walked around your block like nearly every night”) makes it only more endearing, especially when an actually intimate lyric like “I check if you are online” cuts through. As bombastic as this is, it’s not overproduced — rather than going for “hey look at my ginormous budget!,” it serves more to accentuate the emotion (yes, even the trap drums). This results in something that doesn’t necessarily try to be cool, but uses the same tools as Woodkid to tell a more emotional story, and succeeds.
[7]