Frisk Frugt – Dansktoppen møder Burkina Faso i det himmelblå rum hvor solen bor, suite

Exotic Pylon

Absolutely love the cover for this! A grinning turnip head with nasty teeth, pipe and wire glasses. A comedy shaman vibe which fits well with the jovial surrealism enclosed.

Sharing a similarly damaged vibe to fellow Nordic maverick Goodiepal, the first track “Animal accompaniment is a cage they can fly out”‘ (well that’s what Google is telling me) is like some fairground attraction filled with weird ’70s kid Casio muzak. 8-bit oompah horse rides mounted on wonky strings, jib-jabbed in noise and what sounds like John Cage music taking vicious tumbles, spoonfed into a spacey spin cycle at the local launderette.

The music is open plan, an index of possibility; a bizarre upbeat jumble sale of squirty tempos and bouncy keyboard,  My Little Pony gabble and sunshine bubblegum cakes of tune filled with dozens of diversions. Hijacked Disney sensibilities whizzing off in jazzy angles, Mali-esque glitters and honkathon scribbles sometimes descending into a psychotically playful burst of atonality. This album’s a muddle of refreshing slants as an odd approximation of traditional is clamped by a tinfoil of Euro romp  or bathed in a bit-crunched Hazy-Fantazy of Hawaiian simmer and musical spoons –  love those periodic ruptures of backing singer too,  sounding as if beamed straight from a particularly day-glo Tokyo children’s programme.

Track six, roughly translated as “Palm Wine Drinking Cleaning vækkelses(revival?) Blues” is my favourite. Starts out all glints of Tropicana guitar with odd bird calls, a mellow trickle quickly injected with some lovely Sublime Frequencies jive, thrown into a mangle of cobra flutes and pounding percussion. Seriously powerful juju that’s suddenly cut to a Trumpton  bob of mechanised heads, a toy brass and eastern swan song refrain of leaky sweetness. A sweetness that continues over the later tracks, where the folksy hues of lyric are filled with playful colourations running off hypno rotaries of melody, harmonic lilts that are either gentle Basho meanders, fingers playing snakes’n’ladders with the fret or chordy fanfares similar to the Penguin Café Orchestra that just seem to dance behind your eyes.

Bloody brilliant stuff and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Frisk Frugt has plenty more where this came from.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-