David Fricke’s Danish Picks: Spot Festival 2016 and Beyond
“We need guitar,” drummer Martin Couri – the Danish half of the Courettes – growled at the sound desk during the duo’s quick, torrid set of Sixties-garage stomp and clang at the Spot Festival in Aarhus, Denmark. “That’s right – we need fat, loud guitar!” singer-guitarist Flavia Couri, Martin’s Brazilian-born wife, shouted in affirmation, with more metaphysical edge and a punctuative silence between each word.
The Courettes, a White Stripes in reverse, got all the guitar they needed from the soundman. So did everyone else tucked into the Kammermusik Sal, a performance room a little bigger than a two-car garage, at the Musikhuset complex, where most of Spot 2016 took place April 28th-30th. There were 10 other acts on at that hour, around the premises and elsewhere in town, among the near-200, most of them Danish, that played the festival’s 22nd year. Scale is vital and relative at Spot, which is presented by ROSA (Danish Rock Council, an industry cooperative) and could fit into a tiny corner of a single night at SXSW.
But Spot is broad enough in scope and elbow room to accomodate symphonic commissions in the Musikhuset’s main concert hall; breakthrough Danish artists like the rapper S!VAS and the modern-rock band Go Go Berlin; and the local non-industry fans who sold out the festival’s wristband quotient this year. I first attended Spot in 2002 and have been back several times, always walking away with intriguing-to-great records, enthusiastically scribbled notes and a favorite new band or three: those, over time, including the Raveonettes, the glacial-pop band Under Byen, R&B-raveup quartet the Blue Van and hyper-mods Thee Attacks.
This Spot was no different. Here is some of the best of what I saw – and what I’m still spinning.
The Courettes, Here Are the Courettes (Sounds of Subterrania)
The duo gets a lot done with the right minimum – drums, guitar and a certainty that there is plenty of new gas in go-go-Sixties retrospection. Flavia is a vocal fireball with a Janis Joplin crust on her X-Ray Spex range; Martin hammers at his kit with the muscular concentration of a blacksmith. Together, at Spot and on recent vinyl-only releases like this 10-inch EP, the Courettes throw their party with staccato consistency and bathroom-echo fidelity in songs like “The Boy I Love” and “I Wanna Be Your Yoko Ono.” A literally descriptive new single, “Boom! Dynamite!” (Bachelor), was recorded at Toe Rag Studios in London, where the White Stripes made 2003’s Elephant – an assuring mark of quality.
Liima, ii (4AD)
This densely packed set in Spot’s biggest dance-hall space featured one of Denmark’s most successful art-pop exports, the trio Efterklang, performing material from their recently issued studio rebirth as Liima. Vocalist Caspar Clausen, electronics specialist Mads Brauer and bassist Rasmus Stolberg, with Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö, have pulled back from the sumptuous detail and shadows of Efterklang’s last album, 2012’s Piramida, to a more direct, danceable suspense that evokes, in a forward way, Depeche Mode, David Bowie’s mid-Seventies in Berlin and, in the album’s boldly titled homage, “Roger Waters.”