Jane Telephonda; Photo Credit: Egill Vidarsson
Based out of the Reykjavik area in Iceland, Jane Telephonda is fronted by husband and wife Ivar Jonsson and Asdis Rosa, along with a seven-member ensemble of Icelanders with even more difficult names to pronounce. Ivar (guitar/vox) and Asdis (vox), along with Albert Thorbergsson (synths), Brynjar Bjornsson (bass), Gretar Olafsson (synths), Hans Julius (vox) , Holmsteinn Halldorsson (drums), Petur Sigurdsson (guitar), and Rafn Johannesson (keyboards), bring a song-driven indie rock sound painted with tones of psychedelia and atmosphere.
With influences running deep from Bowie to Sufjan and Wilco to Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal, and Queen, the band´s debut LP tells stories ranging from the most fundamental questions in the universe, to short stories about leather-clad unicorns held captive in a circus.
Explaining the album title, Boson of Love, Ivar says: “Mankind is constantly searching for answers, trying to explain the existence and creation of the universe, through scientific experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider. But no matter how far we go, we are never any closer to the ultimate truth. We may find the Higgs boson, that is evidence for a Higgs field, that lends mass to all things in the universe, but we don’t know why the Higgs field exists, or how it came about. The one thing we can know and do know however is that we can find the purpose and meaning of life in love and empathy for our fellow men. Hence, Boson of Love.”
Best known for his ambitious concept album Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter, Ivar gathered universal appraise and was nominated for an Icelandic Music Award in 2014. The release was followed by a theatrical production with the same name, running for three months to critical acclaim at the historical Minetta Lane Theater in NYC’s Greenwich Village.
Boson of Love will be released worldwide on November 17th via Brooklyn’s Mother West label, and includes the first two singles from 2016 , “Into the Light We Go” and “Transmuted Saltness”.
The single and video for title track “Boson of Love” is out today, and The Big Takeover is pleased to premiere the reflectively bittersweet and harmonically engaging single, as well as its wild-looking, statement-making video. With the band donning animal masks and making declarations at a boardroom table in Iceland’s parliament, Althingi, the video explores the true nature of politics and the phony and fraudulent nature of people seeking to manipulate and control others.
