No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers (Sacred Bones,2013)
Vår is the project of four best friends from Copenhagen. Each member of the band is involved in several other Danish bands and all four members are also accomplished visual artists. What began as the extremely lo-fi two-piece of Elias Rønnenfelt and Loke Rahbek recording on 4-track has evolved into an experimental noise/industrial/techno pop quartet. On this album Vår utilize everything from acoustic guitar, power electronics, bass, trumpet, multi-tracked vocals, and various percussive instruments, to broken glass & sheet metal samples. No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers is a remarkable debut, an emotional roller coaster of sorts which at times is profoundly uplifting, at times decidedly morose but remains unfailingly moving throughout.
Holing up in the extremely cramped and oft overheated quarters of Sean Ragon’s self-built studio in the back of his Bushwick record store Heaven Street, the band wrote and recorded their first full length during two intense weeks last summer. Exploring themes of love, loss, vanity, hope, fear, sexuality and friendship and drawing more on literary influences than musical ones (Bataille and Shaffer, specifically), the band craft an album which cannot be confined by any singular sub-genre. Words like “industrial” and “electronic” fall short here; they barely begin to scratch the surface of this work. This is soundtrack music for a play that has only begun to be imagined and is light years away from being consummated.
