Our Shiksa Beastie Boys? A gothic cowpunk masterpiece turns 10 and nobody but me gives a sh*t

Iceage recorded their debut album, New Brigade, in three days, when the members of the Danish band were hovering around seventeen years old. The album featured driving basslines seemingly written via Choose Your Own Adventure books, guitar riffs written in a similar spirit of “let’s see what this string does,” vocal melodies pinched from imaginary sea shanties and funeral prayers (sung by a slack jawed* beanpole swimming in a black bomber jacket), and a drummer who may not have been intentionally doing his own version of (Babes In Toyland drummer) Lori Barero's version of Kevin Haskins (of Bauhaus) but who was definitely taking the cliche of “as long as the drummer is good” as a personal challenge.

One of the legends of Joy Division’s first album is that producer Martin Hannett locked the band out of the studio and single-handedly brought the album’s now revered dub aspects into songs that were intended by the band to be punky ragers. New Brigade is like if Joy Division stormed the studio and tried to revert Unknown Pleasures back, but had no studio experience and were also very, very hungover; with the result being the dubbiest post-punk, conveyed by aristocratic chimps, and scrunched up into balls of tinfoil. In other words, New Brigade is one of the few truly great hardcore records. 

At the beginning, in appropriate teenage fashion, the band wrote songs about “remember(ing) these days forever,” and performed them while blackout drunk. But by album two, a now-old-enough-to-vote Iceage traded in treble for washes of distortion and were performing an almost lucid contempt, singing “am I supposed to give in to anything?” as though the compromises of those around them were something to be barely tolerated. Then, within a year of that second album’s release, before most of the members could legally drink in America, Iceage abandoned any lyrical content which could have worked just as well on a Chain of Strength straight-edge anthem. The songs became denunciations of “brash young studs” and rueful posturing about a “world once seen burning in my eyes (just like it is in yours now).” Without losing their baby-faced severity, Iceage very much wanted to be old. 

Hating the kids is as much a trope of 21st Century hardcore (and punk) as it was, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, de rigeur to romantize the little shits. For most bands, any expression of loathing, no matter how deeply felt, was undercut by an understanding that too much severing of the symbiotic relationship between fans and artists might negatively affect hoodie sales. It was further tempered by an accompanying sound that only the young and/or the developmentally arrested could stand. 

Iceage, on the other hand, in 2013, decided to cover Sinead O’Connor. And then follow that tribute with an album of Bohemian dirges, alt-alt-alt-country, and songs inspired by paintings from the Flemish Renaissance; an album sonically and lyrically aimed squarely at Tav Falco fans, the habitues of church basements who’d been exiled from the scene for stealing one too many guitars from their roommates, publicists and hairdressers un-averse to doing a bit of dom work on the side, and all the other amphetamine gothic types who’d once had a threesome with Simon Bonney and dressed like either Siouxsie Sioux or R. Crumb. 

Either counterintuitively, or intuitively in a way that only Iceage and Matador could predict, a fair number of actual young people thought this sounded like a pretty good time. For a time, Iceage’s future was so bright that the band had to grow out its bangs.

With that memory of the kids (on either end) coming through for once having sustained me through so much of the musical dross of the 2010s, I’m fully comfortable admitting that few things, which don’t actually matter, make me more upset than the idea that the kids might no longer care about the band Iceage. It simply kills me that Iceage’s ineffable charm doesn’t seem to have carried over, that—in terms of being relevant to anyone under thirty—the band might end up as a R.E.M.-esque totem to the kids not getting it: a Copenhagian Throwing Muses, our Danish Mudhoney, the shiksa Beastie Boys. (I know "shiksa" is ladies, but it's a funnier word than "sheygetz.") (Also, Dan Kjær Nielsen is Jewish. I'm trying to increase the "open" rate of this newsletter and I appreciate him taking one for the team.)

How could this have happened? Where did it all go wrong? What baby do I have to travel back in time to kill in order to restore the natural order? 

In a recent edition of Larry Fitzmourice’s Last Donut newsletter, black midi’s former front person, Geordie Greep, says “it doesn't seem like anybody really breaks up anymore. I think that's stupid. All the best bands broke up, right? Velvet Underground, the original King Crimson lineup. You know you gotta know when to call it at some point.” This quote is a good one because the whole interview is good (and that’s coming from someone who’s been making “move aside and let the man go through / let the man go through!” jokes about black midi for years) and it’s relevant to this discussion because the subject of this newsletter, Iceage, is as fine a band as the VU reunion and way better than King Crimson (I assume… I only know King Crimson from the Rorschach cover of “21st Century Schizoid Man” and the Daryl Hall’s satanist album produced by Robert Fripp, which admittedly is pretty sweet) and, with those uncontroversial facts out of the way, it’s clear that, if anyone should break up, it’s Iceage. Heck, now that Mo Tucker has the politics that Iceage were accused of having fifteen years ago (when they were still teenagers and drawing nooses and switchblades on their jeans, and not hiding their Absurd LPs under the mattress), Iceage breaking up would maybe give some closure to the poor saps who bought the first Velvets album and didn’t start a band. 

I don’t want Iceage to break up. Loving Iceage is a part of my identity in the same way that underfed doggies with bandanas is an integral part of the identity for train-hopping oogles. It defines me in the way that wryly quoting Jawbreaker lyrics helps define sellouts. Of all signifiers that I use to distance myself from God’s terrifying truth, my loving Iceage is close to being number one. I don’t want to overestimate my influence on a reader’s record purchases. But I’m aware that sometimes the hyperbole with which I talk about Iceage can be frustrating to those who might not want to have to parse the sincerity of my comparing the band to one Greek god or another just to find out if I think a new Iceage album is worth spending $12 on. Rest assured that—even if my love for the band has become a bit of a self-meme in recent years, even if I have occasionally described the band’s aryan qualities with a problematical fetishization of whiteness akin to that of a Jewish comic book writer designing superheroes in the 1930s, and even if, despite having the latter pointed out to me, I still occasionally insist on jokingly (?) objectifying Elias Rønnenfelt in the erotically indefinite language of My Immortal's descriptions of inter-wizardry coitus—the sincerity underpinning my ardor for the actual music of Iceage has never wavered. 

In part this is because I will always have a soft spot for the first wave of Actually Exciting rock bands to appear in the chronological proximity of my having given up my own dreams of being in a band that genuinely excited people (en masse). With Iceage forming within the years that my resignation went from affect to effect, and being both way too young (and hanging in way too young crowds) for me to reasonably consider them rivals in my once unrelenting, lateral slog across the social hierarchy of domestic hipsterdom, a band like Iceage got the full force of my fandom. I was just happy to have bands that I could enjoy without being simultaneously jealous of them. 

As to why this newfound failure-inspired joie de' vivre didn’t extend to other newish bands of the early 2010s (such as Fleet Foxes or Real Estate) can be explained as a matter of taste. In that I have taste. I gave up my dreams. Not my ears. It’s in this that the other (and hopefully main) reason for my undying fondness lives; New Brigade was a profoundly terrific album. MRR was right. Dais Records was right. Then What’s Your Rupture? was right. Crazy Spirit, the first American superstars to take Iceage on tour, were right. Jesse Gasface and all the other alt-skinheads, sharing a previously unrealized hope for a pre-dub Joy Division played with the vim and vigor of Kyushu noise-punkers, were right. And—as one of the few people at Iceage’s first American show who wasn’t surprised (or remotely dismayed) that they weren’t the edgier Interpol that the blogs had promised—I was right. Still am. Listening to New Brigade now, the bumptious lil’ fucker hasn’t lost a step. 

Neither has You’re Nothing, the second Iceage album, which saw the fully legal heartbreakers inventing jangle-Oi! (a full decade before the concept of skinheads who couldn’t take a punch became fashionable). Neither has Iceage’s 4th long player: 2018’s Beyondless, where our pasty knights hear olde-tyme-y rock and roll for the first time, decide they quite like it, and make a renaissance fair of track-marked ‘n’ horn-charted, more-north-than-northern pin-eye soul. As for 2021’s Seek Shelter; I still maintain that every critic who lauded it should write a letter of apology to Vue and that it’s an album best taken as a massive in-joke that Sonic Boom (the ex-Spaceman 3 who produced) psy-oped into existence to make fun of Spiritualized. But, also, I don’t blame Iceage for Keef and Mick perpetuating the myth that the Rolling Stones made Exile On Mainstreet in their sleep, and that similar results might be attained by anyone with enough access to hard drugs and a gospel choir. Anyway, Seek Shelter is growing on me. 

Which brings us back to Plowing Into the Field of Love,  Iceage’s (legitimately) pivotal third album, which just turned 10, making it almost old enough to form an Iceage tribute act (the anniversary of Plowing Into the Field of Love’s American release is technically October 7th but, as that date is now a designated high holy day for newsletter writers, I had the week off). 

Seeing as the newsletter you’re currently reading is named after a song from Plowing Into the Field of Love (no I shall not be abbreviating it), it’s clearly a well regarded album around here. I’ve written extensively about almost every Iceage album, going so far as to write the bio for Shake The Feeling (their Outtakes and Rarities album which, with the straightest of faces, starts at 2015) but the best thing I’ve written about them is still my Talkhouse review of Plowing Into the Field of Love. In fact, my review is so good (if I do say so myself), I doubt I can add much to it here. Maybe a few paragraphs more about how the album is a tribute to Kid Congo Powers in the same way that the movie Titanic  was a tribute to getting wet. Perhaps something about how drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen’s transition from hardcore drummer to particularly martial cowpunk drummer provides such a masterclass on how emotionally versatile a simple snare roll can be that they should invent a prize for snare playing, name it after Victor DeLorenzo, and award the first one to Iceage’s drummer. If I felt like adding a bit more vaguely insulting praise, I could add a bit about how Elias Rønnenfelt would maybe be a better singer if, after Plowing Into the Field of Love, he’d stopped getting better at singing. He’s still a wonderful frontman and his current singing style suits that Euro-rural Stones-approximating that the band currently favors, but he’s never sounded better than he does here; like a magical clam passing one phlegmatically perfect/imperfect pearl after another. 

But that’s probably all I’d add. Because the nascent gothic cowpunk movement I tried to wishful-think into existence in my review never really materialized. Hank Wood and the Hammerheads refused to strive for success like it was a job, Walker from Crazy Spirit’s country-rock moves never truly suited his particular brand of needling charisma and he eventually returned to pure punksterdom. And most of the other potential cow-punks moved on—from mining cocaine rhinestones to boofing ketamine dance music, or simply going whole hog into no-twang goth, sobriety, shoegaze, or death—faster than you could say “shoelace headband.” Finally, Iceage themselves got over the Gun Club worship with such an alacrity that you could conclude that the cowpunk was less intentional than a happy offshoot result of much of the band still learning how to play their instruments. Don’t let the anti-desert-rock propaganda from the Dune memes fool you. It’s not fear that’s the killer. It’s competence. 

Iceage themselves have not disowned Plowing Into the Field of Love in the slightest. They are playing the album in its entirety in Copenhagen this month. Maybe Matador Records would have made a to-do about the anniversary if Iceage hadn’t made the lateral-minus-1 jump to Mexican Summer a few years back. But considering that anniversaries are at this point the bread and butter of mid-tier indie, the absence of any push to commemorate an album that was so well admired when it came out is notable. 

When it comes to guitar rock, I don’t put much stock in any metrics (besides my, my wife’s, and sometimes Ted Leo’s judgment). That said, I also can’t help but note that, besides the complete blackout on interminable essays about how Plowing Into the Field of Love taught a college-age music writer that it was ok to be weird, Iceage’s Spotify numbers are nearly inverse to how often their songs play monthly in my heart. More worrisome still is the fact that it’s been four years since Elias Rønnenfelt has been mentioned on r/Ladyboners (with two years since he rated a mention on the r/Ladyboners consolation prize that is r/alt-LadyBoners). 

I’m not running Iceage down. Again, I don’t care how popular a band is. And maybe the dearth of anniversary posts has something to do with the album in question having less to do with being an aspiring rock critic learning to love yourself and more to do with choking on pheromones and black lace as 100 euro bottles of wine are poured over your naked body. And maybe the Spotify numbers simply don’t reflect all the Iceage fans listening to Plowing Into the Field of Love on whale bone Victrolas. 

But I am curious/worried about whether Iceage’s popularity has diminished in the physical world. If so, what might be contributing to Iceage currently having whatever the opposite of a moment is. (And before my enemies start in on the band just “not being good anymore,” I’ll point out that, regardless of my own ambivalence about the record, Seek Shelter received some of Iceage’s best critical notices since their debut.) 

Outside of lies and slander, how is that Iceage—AKA the Cronenbergian ideal of an Alvvays caught in a telepod with a Yung Lean—have somehow failed to maintain traction with either today’s rockist mobs or intelligentsia? 

Is it because Iceage turned their backs on punk, goth, and post-punk (the safety nets of genres) all together? Was the ABRA cover the bridge too far, veering dangerously close, as it did, to the YouTube covers of rap songs which the younger generation is so embarrassed of? Was it "Lockdown Blues"? Are the kids just no longer reading A Season in Hell, making the entire post-You're Nothing Iceage project obsolete? Is it because, on the new Elucid album, Skech185 says, “catch me playing devil's advocate with Steve Albini's black friend,” essentially putting a pin in any fence walking alt-edgelordshipness for the foreseeable future?  Is it that—in a boho-depressive underground that thinks that a noise rock song** with lyrics that Discharge would have discarded as “a bit on the nose” is actually super, super important—Iceage’s lyrical fixation, on a homelessness of a more existential nature, are considered counterrevolutionary? Are the architecture fascists on Twitter correct; is there no longer a place in this culturally Marxist world for a sad boi Danish prince? Is it that, burned by one chatty-Cathy 1975 too many, people are no longer listening with their eyes, that they no longer trust a male rock and roll singer who doesn't look like he was born to be an adjunct professor but got on the wrong bus? 

Or was Iceage never that popular to begin with, and—invested in a mass spiritual awakening to the merits of The Las Vegas Story as I am—I just couldn’t see it?

It could be any of the above. But it’s probably that last one. Regardless of the hype (and despite this article and this one, which both generously credit Iceage with kicking off the current post-punk revival), the scene was never exactly overrun with bands citing You’re Nothing as a key influence. Me, you, Sky Ferreira, Bambara, and a smattering of critics (as prone to post-punk wishcasting as I am) are barely a quorum, let alone a majority. 

This, if accurate, is a shame. As much as I do love to be validated by my opposition to the majority’s terrible taste in indie rock, I did enjoy being an early champion of a band on the winning side for once. Maybe if Iceage had been as overwhelmingly beloved as I’d imagined, I would have been forced by my own nature to denounce them, but I don’t think so. There’s a case to be made that Iceage’s callbacks to sounds of the past were as much a sign of the underground’s loss of cultural potency as Mark Fisher famously ascribed to Arctic Monkeys. After all, in Fisher’s worries about hauntology, didn’t Iceage commune with ghosts who were at least adjacent to whatever dead people Alex Turner sees? Would any insistence on my part, that “actually Iceage’s post-punk revivalism was entirely different from the cookie cutter necrophilia of Arctic Monkeys/Savages/Idles,” be any different than all the hacks using “punk energy” to describe whatever inertia-core product is topping the “Ultimate Indie” Spotify playlist?

No. Fuck no.

First of all, against all odds, I have somehow managed to avoid whatever deficit-of-character makes a person take a band they like becoming popular as a personal attack. And, despite any accusations from the serial droolers whose souls run on lists, I am not a contrarian. I get my opinions from the same place that Noah got his cruise ship blueprints; a good God who trusts me to save all the hedgehogs and worthy post-punk bands from the rain. 

And, in that, Iceage was different, goddamnit. I’m tempted to just say that if you can’t hear the obvious difference between the ragged inspiration of Plowing Into the Field of Love and the silicon sheen production which Johnny Hostile used to smother the life out of every Savages record, then that’s on you (and I hope you can swim). But I suppose that in this era of disinformation, some further explanation (as to why everyone is addicted to crazy pills but me) is required.

I joke about Iceage’s originality being a product of incompetence and luck, but that’s not true. As unfortunate, in many respects, as the band’s teenage record collection may have been, the “apolitical” sketchy music went hand in hand with scabrous anarcho-punx like Sexdrome and liberation anti-theology of a band like Rudimentary Peni. Rather than the band’s early flirting with unlistenable being unintentional, it’s undeniable how deeply, and willfully, influenced Iceage was by noise and black metal. If they’d just wanted to sound like Crisis, they would have.

It’s also worth pointing out that there was another context for the onset post-punk revival. The nascent blogosphere and social medias were already proving adept at meeting the demands of ever shrinking cycles of nostalgia and reenactment, so the five years that separated the post-punk revival of the 2010s from the previous post-punk revival seemed like a lifetime. Within that lifetime, some members of the subsection of hardcore known as “mysterious guy hardcore” (a scene notable for its strong sense of graphic design, songwriting/production that made the Germs sound like Steely Dan, and band names that were hard to look up) discovered English music/college rock and girls/drugs and decided that maybe the former was a shorter line to the latter than wearing Prurient long-sleeves and being in bands that sounded like Greg Ginn’s backwash. So, even though no writers/blogs were yet dating/writing about them, bands like Merchandise (ex-Cult Ritual), Gun Outfit (ex-White Boss, associates w/ Sex Vid), and Milk Music (not ex-anything as far as I know, but still embraced by hardcore types looking to grow their hair out) quickly built fan bases based on irl community, ‘zine culture’s last couple hurrahs, and online chatter. 

Along with trebly anti-pop miscreants like Crazy Spirit and Raspberry Bulbs, it was this (dis)associated scene (with Total Control out of Australia thrown in for kicks) which Iceage made the most sense in—a scene interested in post-punk and actual choruses, but only on the ideologically punkest of terms, and only if the songs were filtered through lo-fi, drone, back metal, a Meat Puppets-esque adherence to the cosmic, or any other sound which might provide some sort of buffer between the songs and the squares. No matter how much the blogs wanted a redux of Turn On The Bright Lights, Iceage was always going to cede only as much to atmospherics as could be communicated via a mile and a half of guitar feedback. 

Some of the above bands came out concurrent to (or a bit after) New Brigade, and whether any of these band’s limited run vinyl reached Copenhagen is something I don’t feel like looking up, but they all deserve as much credit as Iceage for setting the stage for the last ten-to-thirteen years of distorted near-melodies and disaffected muttering. Whether any of them would be happy to hear that they’re indirectly responsible for a hundred million bands devoted to making Mark Fisher recoil in his grave is hard to say, but let’s at least give them the credit of being the first of the Twenty-Tens post-punk revival, and for having enough self-respect to never having dressed like they were in Oasis. 

Another small but important difference between Iceage and any hauntology strivers propped up by the NME is that, as I noted in the start of this essay, Iceage only briefly romanticized being young. By the time they were in their twenties, Iceage thematically draped themselves in the sort of self-mythological doom-filia most often associated with consumptive poets. Even the band’s most romantic exultations were tinged with an endearingly affected world weariness. Like that Onion article about the homophobe who can’t leave his house without getting his dick sucked, Elias Rønnenfelt consistently protested to a premature exhaustion with all the debauchery that seemed to just fall in his way. 

If he’d only gone far enough into that exhaustion to affect cruelty (and Iceage had provided the disaffected narcolepsy to match), the band could have been a proto-Weeknd (or proto-proto-asshole-era Drake) but instead Rønnenfelt was backed by an increasingly baroque hootenanny which, absent any recycled trap or trip-hop beats, might come off as confusing (or indecisive) to an audience that just wants to party and/or die. 

Alternately, if Iceage had doubled down on the hootenanny by throwing in sing-along choruses about friendship (or even some of the semi-anthemic oblique pamphleteering of New Brigade’s chorus/verses), Iceage could have maybe maintained their space within the indie-sphere. But even though they have some of the most catchy verses of any band around, Iceage (outside of moaning “total drench” a few times) don’t really “do” proper choruses. They prefer to just give the verses an increasing amount of oomf and then move on to the next song, which isn’t really what the community-minded kids are looking for. 

Anyway, Rønnenfelt is too gleefully (in his fashion) solipsistic for pandering universality. If it turns out that there’s a chorus on the Beyondless cutting room floor of the Iceage frontman singing,“I’m dating Sky Ferreira / and you’re not” (but in 18th Century French), I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. 

As much as I dig Beyondless (and, past that, respect the artists’ prerogative to do whatever the hell they like), retrospect does cast Plowing Into the Field of Love into the role of a crossroads album; a pack of post punk (in the sense that they were pretty much done with punk) aesthetes, with more soul to sell than takers, staring down an embarrassment of highways. Arguably, they should have stayed there. 

Or maybe it was always a foregone conclusion that Iceage would become the anachronisms that they always strived to be. While some of the reasons that young men (of any gender) no longer want to be Nick Cave are better than others, I can’t blame a generation that came up drowning in the opioid crisis for not wanting to hang out in Iceage’s opium den. As for the teen idol aspects of the band that I semi-ironically bang on about, I also don’t blame any prospective fangirls (of any gender) for preferring the honesty of a Future or the deceit of all the indie nice boys to the more oblique red flag waving of Rønnenfelt. Ladies who are drawn to an Iceage-ian milieu, even one where the sad-eyed wastrels are deejays or podcasters and the footwear game is absolute shit, will end up dating some variation of the Iceage singer at some point anyway, so maybe listening to the literal band whilst being distractedly nuzzled by the archetype would be too much of a good thing. 

Their loss though. Because, almost entirely devoid of capital “C” choruses as it is, and played with a hubris that joyously outpaced the band’s technical ability, Plowing Into the Field of Love is in many ways Iceage at its best. If the word “vibes” hadn’t become synonymous with inner vacancy, I’d apply it here and intend it as the highest of praise. These are songs that raise the stakes on louche to an absurd degree, with a humor and offhanded disregard for mortality/morality that can only come from young men who mean every word, no matter how ridiculous (which, to be clear, isn’t the same as every word not being true). Less a call to arms than an afterhours text to oblivion, the album couldn’t have gotten its air of urban spaghetti western drama, ecclesiastical sweatiness, and groovy dissolution better if it’d tried. If it did try, Plowing Into the Field of Love has got the additional merit of not sounding like it. 

In this; in light of Iceage's not-exactly-outré embrace of the inevitable, the kids will hopefully come around. After all, getting old isn’t easy but it doesn’t require a lot of effort. Maybe Iceage’s performative decay was the predictable end result of consuming too much French romantic poetry and Scott Walker 4. But maybe that old standby, the prejudice of small difference, makes the band's particular (and particularly contradictory) hodgepodge of sluttish self-aggrandizement and puritanical rancor incompatible with the current generation's near-same. If the order of the day is smeared makeup, absent the process of smearing, and pornography where nobody's hands get dirty, maybe the band's indie sleaze is too rooted in actual scum to translate as either escapist good time or a bad time with the required thereupitic value. It’s not like Plowing Into the Field of Love is horny for death exclusively. But, libertines at heart, Iceage wasn’t sweating the age gap either. 

Thanks for reading.

Don't forget to please share and subscribe! And please don't forget to subscribe to CREEM! As always, if you want to purchase music by myself and Zohra, I wouldn't kick it out of bed for eating crackers. https://zohra.bandcamp.com/album/murder-in-the-temple https://publicistuk.bandcamp.com/album/forgive-yourself https://djinnblossoms.bandcamp.com/album/two-wedding-songs https://telematics.bandcamp.com/album/hounds-b-w-simmer https://azarswan.bandcamp.com

*Anyone who’s spent time with male models or actors of any gender that there’s a thin strip of wilderness between slack jawed and lips which are sensually parted. Displaying the ostentatious intellectualism common amongst the unintentionally pretty, Elias Rønnenfelt has long walked that line. 

**yes, I’m still dying on the hill of that old-skull ass “why” song being absolute hooey (with a good beat). That said, new Chat Pile album is indeed pretty sick. So what do I know? (and I’m not just saying that because all my friends yell at me about how nice C. Pile are. My friends think everyone is nice.) Also, while I def recommend purchasing the new Chat Pile, I’ll also strongly suggest that—if you enjoy Chat Pile—you also please consider spending a few bucks on the excellent new God Bullies album, in order to keep said God Bullies off those outside streets of which Chat Pile speaks.