There’s a certain amount of swagger required to release a song that happily leaves its threads out on the seams. Modern music tends to devolve into a contest to weed out every single human flaw and to force every drum to align to the grid or smoothen vocals until they might qualify for a passport photo.
But when Oslo’s SoundFarm dropped ‘Suck It Up’, they came out asking something fairly impudent: What if it was the imperfection that we were listening for?
The song was improvised on the fly during a rehearsal jam session, and there’s no doubt about that-’Suck It Up’ does not sound like an attempt to build it in a box. Produced live by the band without the aid of click track or sample, the rhythm feels elastic and fluid, occasionally skipping forward where and when it feels human. True groove is not measured with any mathematical ruler, rather its simply whether your foot tapping begins before your brain even recognises it’s moving. Musicly, it fits somewhere within the cheeky and carefree-yet-tight gusto of Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ “Zoot Suit Riot”’ and the elasticized, spacey pocket- funk that has been expertly wielded by Hiatus Kaiyote on “Red Room” and “Nakamarra”.
But whilst this is neither as trumpet-soaked or as melodramatic than the Daddies, nor quite as theoretically expansive as Hiatus Kaiyote’s grooves, it shares their conviction as they still all operate with a core value that rhythm should bounce and have air within it, rather than being rigidly enforced.
Even so, there are bits here that teeter dangerously close to overbalancing the self indulgent but as a whole does a jolly good job of sounding like musicians having a conversation rather than just playing it by the book. At the core of ‘Suck It Up’, Marle B. Trolldalen’s vocals are smooth yet gravelly and the rhythm section does all the heavy lifting; every player seems engaged with, or playing off the others rather than working from a list.
We have reached an era where that has become a truly rarified quality. The production only underscores these sonic intentions: vintage gear and even a shake of an empty rice container thrown onto the percussion, all lends a warmth and earthiness to proceedings rather than a polished shine. Whilst we romanticise analogue for being ‘real’ more than we ‘digital’ counterparts, these devices don’t actually work in and of themselves-an analog recorder does not automatically a Stanley Kubrick make.
But that’s the thing, SoundFarm is committed to recording musicians performing, not constructing sounds.
Rather than chase structure that appeals to any music streaming service as if a god of new listening pleasures. Ultimately, Suck It Up sounds alive.
That should not be an extraordinary feat, but in an era where precision over anything has now become dominant, you may have a hard task to convince yourself otherwise; in the age of digitally cleaned sonic perfection.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
