Elias Rønnenfelt is a stirring solo star still overshadowed by Iceage
On the day that Elias Rønnenfelt took to the stage for a solo show in London, Iceage released their first song in five years.
This isn’t to say that the Danish singer is overshadowed by his Copenhagen punk band, with five impressive albums under their belt. On the contrary, Rønnenfelt’s solo career is commendable in its own right.
His collaborative extended EP with Dean Blunt, Lucre, offers a moodboard of discordant, dreamy, and dissociative atmospheres, while his latest solo offering, Speak Daggers, sharpens the poetic side of his work into something truly cinematic with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and his wild, scraggly voice.
On any other day, that’s more than enough to make the leather jacket-clad crowd of North London’s Dome come near to forgetting Rønnenfelt’s iconic roots (true enough, I’m yet to meet a drivelly London frontman who hadn’t referenced Rønnenfelt as his one unique reference). But with the release of the relentless new Iceage song, ‘Star’, as well as an Instagram post promising “news” to come, Rønnenfelt was up against himself in the stardom arena.
When the 33-year-old took to the stage, there was no fanfare. No one whooped, no one yelled. This is how the night would go: Here, the esteemed musician would play tunes, skittering impressively across genre but tied tightly together by that reliable, undeniable vocal. Here, we would watch and nod and crane our necks around London’s impossibly tall posers. Rønnenfelt didn’t say anything. Neither did we. The music was atmospheric, but the mood was… Ambivalent.
Maybe this is not the kind of music for the body. After all, Rønnenfelt’s lyricism is highly esteemed, intermingling a phantasmagorical idea of sex and desire with the gripping unease of death and decay. “We’re just an amalgamation of moments passed,” he moans on ‘Hollow Noon’, nodding toward his lyrical smorgesbord of flowery frenetics.
“All we do is fade, confined abject delay, choked the break of day, grew spores to pollinate,” Rønnenfelt muses on ‘Mona Lisa’. Sure enough, the star was selling hand-written, signed lyrics to ‘Mona Lisa’. It was self-indulgent in an obvious way, in a way that says the frontman knows exactly how to be a frontman.
But what’s a frontman without his band? Rønnenfelt didn’t concern himself with the question. Skipping staunchly behind his acoustic guitar as if it were a medieval shield, the vocalist was propped up by a thudding bass, a soaring violin which tittered and plucked in all the opportune moments, and a steady, if understated drumbeat as he raced through the likes of ‘USA Baby’ and ‘Bunt Force Trauma’.
It was a self-indulgent six-song encore that almost undid the whole shebang. Rønnenfelt did, in fairness, invite another performer onto the stage, whose higher-pitched voice teased out a new timbre, but she read the lyrics off a sheet of paper, which was mildly distracting from Rønnenfelt’s sweat-confirmed commitment.
Thankfully, the superstar soared through a few acoustic Iceage songs, ‘Plowing Into the Field of Love‘ and ‘Against the Moon’ in the final moments to spruce the quarter-full venue up once more, but Londoners are not exactly known for their committed attention spans. When it was over, the crowd left without any real fanfare.
Rønnenfelt has an undeniable voice. This was already an established fact. His latest London performance showcased the best of his solo work, but the frontman couldn’t quite beat off the Iceage excitement. No bother, because the band is back in the arena, and, anyway, is beating yourself at your own game really a loss? Iceage Summer, here we come.
