Hi Robert. What do you tip this week?
‘It is a happy day for Dutch pop music: the Amsterdam band Personal Trainer has released its first album. Big Love Blanket (★★★★★, 10 tracks) is a delicious, exciting indie record. Explosive, but also very beautiful in the quiet songs. Intelligent, good lyrics, nice hooks, smart guitar parts. And every song is lifted by frontman Willem Smit, who recites his lyrics beautifully. Personal Trainer is one of those bands that are going to do well outside the borders, and we don’t have that very often. They are already playing in England this week.
‘The band, which consists of six members in addition to the lead singer, circles around Smit. He is in any case a bit of a spider in the web in the Amsterdam indie scene. His girlfriend is Pip Blom, lead singer of the band of the same name, so the two of them really are the royal couple of the indie.
‘You tend to name all kinds of bands they resemble. The beautiful slow song milk sounds a bit like Paul McCartney, further on I also hear a bit of The Kinks, but also LCD Soundsystem. And you really hear the rich pop history that is in Big Love Blanket processed, but the band still has its own sound, they don’t copy anything.
‘And even without all those associations from the past, the songs jump out of the speakers. The Lazer for example, a song you just want to dance to in a club has a nice bouncy guitar groove. And Personal Trainer keeps your attention on every song until the end, as reviewer Pablo Cabenda also writes.
‘Because it is mainly a live band, they have relatively few listeners on the streaming platforms for the time being, of course they couldn’t play much in recent years. But: they present their album next Sunday in Concerto in Amsterdam, are the support act for De Staat and are also at the Le Guess Who festival in Utrecht. That large audience will certainly come, especially with this album.’
Then on to Norway, with Darkthrone.
‘The first thing I noticed about the new Darkthrone was the album cover. The covers of this band were always very morbid and satanic in the nineties, but on the new record Astral Fortress (★★★★☆, 7 songs) you see an old metalhead skating on a Norwegian lake. That immediately indicates the direction of this record, that bit of self-mockery.
‘Black metal was a rather nihilistic, evil movement in the nineties, but today it is the most innovative movement in heavy music. Darkthrone is with the world plate A Blaze in the Northern Sky from 1992 one of the founders of the genre. on Astral Fortress they absolutely love the old idiom: it seems as if they now show the beauty of the music in an accessible way. And that beauty lies in the sadness and minorness of those long rumbling guitar chords, which are recorded very nicely on this record, with a very analog sound.
‘I have Astral Fortress I’ve listened to it about thirty times now, I think. The numbers just grow on you. Darkthrone never became a big band, they never performed. But it is a legendary cult band. This album is also fun for new listeners of black metal: it’s not a lot of noise, but actually a very accessible record.’
Also worth listening to this week:
The 98-year-old (!) alto saxophonist Marshall Allen has been keeping the legacy of jazz composer Sun Ra alive for thirty years in the Sun Ra Arkestra. He does that on the new album Living Sky (★★★★☆, 7 songs) powerful and sometimes disruptive, supported by the wonderful melodies of the nineteen musicians playing along.
Peter van Rooijen excels as an astute songwriter and has focused on his new album Love, Death & Bob Ross (★★★★☆, 13 songs) thoroughly indulged in the arrangements, writes Joris Henquet. Expect musical winks to Brel and Doe Maar, on an album that is anything but bourgeois.