Shining
Grindstone
Rune Grammofon, 2007
By Allana Mayer
Everyone talks about the perfect summer album — something perky, energetic, danceable, and filled with the imagery of either bright sunshine or a full nightlife. Which I suppose makes the perfect winter album something cold, dead, lonely, and suicide-compelling. I don’t mind that definition: I was searching those types of songs out for my annual winter mix (especially dreary this year, I’m proud to say). There’s nothing better than refusing to leave your bed with something mopey on your speakers.
Really, though, I think I’ve been waiting for a nice heavy album since mid-December. Everything released so far this year has been soft and gentle fluff, and quite enjoyably so. But even a nice girl like me needs to feel sinister every once in a while.
From Grindstone’s first track, “In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be a Monster,” Shining starts throwing down cheesy power-metal gimmicks, almost by-the-book. The rest makes you wonder where Mike Patton’s name will appear in the liner notes. Everything — I repeat, everything — about this album is baffling enough to act as a caffeine jolt to your Seasonal Affective Disorder’d system. It’s sort of like the soundtrack of an epic adventure movie, played at varying speeds forwards and backwards, by an ominous-looking DJ trying to give his dancing audience a joint heart attack from overexertion. And it’s hella fun. For a while.
But I’ve gotta admit that I probably won’t listen to Grindstone more than a half-dozen times before relegating it to the back shelf of my music collection, because it’s just not that listenable. Refusing to linger on a single structure or a whacky instrument (harpsichord, vocoder) for even a full song, it sounds continuously fresh and unexpected; but as interesting an experiment as it is, the album is by no means much of a success.
Intelligent and fascinating, definitely; skilled and full of diverse musical inspiration, blatantly. Grindstone’s another one of those Norwegian albums that would require hours of contemplation, if only it could compel me to dig up the energy for it. And that’s a major fault: as much as I’d appreciate a nice alternative to all the mundane winter albums out now, it really just makes me want to crawl back into the fort I’ve made out of the bed-linens and put on something lulling and sentimental.
For a simpleton like me, listening to Shining is exhausting — and I expect it will be for many others, too. Sooner or later, you get to the point where you wonder if it’s worth the mental energy to say, “Yeah, [insert obscure band], I love them!” I scrounged up the impetus to translate Shining’s Morse-code-titled song (it’s “Bach”, in case you’re wondering, and yes, there are more harpsichords), and that was asking a lot. But I’m sure by the time spring comes around, I’ll start digging around the back shelf looking for all those albums I’ve discarded during my hibernation, and I’ll find something to love about Grindstone.
