Whether Evan Zorn Von Berg is actually the reincarnation of a Dark Age Germanic Lord or just thinks he is, is something you will have to discuss with him yourself. I interviewed him and his band Rubbish Party a while ago, and even I’m not sure of the reality. But what matters is the music, so I’m happy to leave that question unresolved. after all, who am I to tell him who he can and cant be?
The three tracks that make up Return were initially written to be part of the Rubbish Party canon, but for reasons known only to the band, they didn’t make the cut. But, rather than discard them on the midden heap outside the music-making longhouse, Von Berg decided that they had enough merit to be released under his own name.
And for a band who, as individuals at least, seem to be out of place in the modern world, musically they echo with some very contemporary sounds. If you were expecting tribal drums and flugelhorns, lyres and lutes, you are out of luck, for as opener “Return Home” proves, there is a wonderful mix of post-punk pop and a crooner-infused New Romantic sounds found in their musical DNA. A heady blend of the old analogue ways of the seventies running headlong into the new digital progression of the early eighties.
Similarly, “British Isles Bop” has more than a touch of 80’s Bowie about it, or at least that version of his sound that the Blitz Kids adopted, that heady blend of pop and funk and soul and rock all swirling around in the most commercial and accessible of ways.
“Ash” is all about the eighties touch, a blend of 1980s music and 680’s lyricism, but reminds me of the sort of sound you would have heard from a band opening up for the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen or The Cure during their more pop-inspired years. The sort of band the younger me would have gravitated to when I first started going to gigs.
These songs are strange yet wonderfully accessible, nostalgic yet somehow perfect for the present, pagan-infused yet pop-centric. Never has a set of songs been so conflicted in its identity yet so compelling, so catchy in its delivery.
This is music made where cultism meets commerciality, the dark ages meets the space age.
