Marching Church - Telling It Like It Is

Pitchfork 64

All the world’s a stage to Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Iceage frontman and Marching Church mastermind. The Dane was sporting a death mask when we first met him in the early ’10s—a grungy Hamlet, flailing and wailing beneath the house lights. Championed by Matador, his band ascended, and in time, those tragic poses became more polished, less garish—and on 2014’s ambitious Plowing Into the Field of Love, downright romantic.

Rønnenfelt attempted to continue Iceage’s momentum after their last album, but his writing failed to open up a clear map for the band’s next steps. Naturally, the musician wrung out his brainstorms into the new Marching Church album instead. This time around, the project’s no longer a solo effort: Rønnenfelt’s formally incorporated his backing band from This World Is Not Enough–a formidable crew featuring members of Lower, Hand of Dust, and others—and his Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith into the group writ large. Such moves beg the question of overarching intentions, of where Iceage ends and Marching Church begins; despite the confessional undertones of its title, Telling It Like It Is offers little in the way of demarcation–but boy, is there drama.

Last year, the Dane visualized his Marching Church as one man’s luxuriant fantasy, plucked from the pages of Dorian Gray (“What I pictured was me in a comfortable armchair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne”). This decadence—manifested in moaned tantrums, eye-rolling Swans worship, and directionless, woe-is-me racket—torpedoed This World Is Not Enough, rendering it a slog. Thankfully, Marching Church’s sophomore effort scales back the melodrama and ramps up the discipline: Rønnenfelt and company are focused on verses and choruses and dynamics, rather than self-indulgent noodling—and in the case of this album, a little bit goes a long way.

The delirious “Lion’s Den” opens with a far-off subterranean rumble—Kristian Emdal’s loping bass encircles a skittering piano line, while the forlorn melodica squeals–before a brittle, clanging backbeat surfaces, kicking off the hypnotic death march over which Rønnenfelt presides, eyes glinting, lips curled. After he’s lulled us into complacency with an otherworldly falsetto, the chorus hits, his voice deepens into his usual bloodthirsty moan, and dread sets in. “In the lion’s den,” he taunts, as if smelling our fear through the speakers, “They still bite after you/They still chase after you/Come on in.” Is Rønnenfelt offering an escape from the beasts’ assault, or is he just another big cat in the big city, peering from behind his disguise?

The beauty’s in the liminality: not just on “Lion’s Den,” but in the album’s broader creative approach, which, however formalistically grounded, seeks to blur the lines between human passion and studio precision through copious overdubbing. “We wanted it to sound like a studio and the instruments, as if the studio became a member of the band,” he told CLRVYNT, “We didn't want it to sound like a realistic live band playing.” Indeed, the album’s inherent connections with the uncanny valley, its inquiries into where the band ends and the cavernous surroundings begin, are more effective dramatic vessels than any of Rønnenfelt’s ham-fisted imagery. It’s hard not to stifle a chuckle at his operatic bellows regarding the act of being “fist-fucked by destiny,” or at the blistering chorus on “Heart of Life,” wherein the Dane offers a compelling impression of Nick Cave after a few too many cocktails—“At the heart of life, shoo-gahh!.” On the other hand, the record's overarching dynamics—the existential tug-of-war between the band’s hypnotic krautrock attack, Rønnenfelt’s vengeful yowls, and the studio’s limitless expanses on the glam-but-glum “2016” and the country-tinged “Calenture” (familiar and yet ever-so-off, like a trip to Westworld)–suggest that the musician’s at least partially aware of his own absurdity, and perhaps, that he’s learning how to weaponize it.