Copenhagen Festival with quality acts!

Image by: Beat Day 

Balstyrko has just been announced to play at Beat Day which is an two-days long festival held in Copenhagen on the 14.-15. of August. The program looks very interesting, both the Danish names and the ones from abroad. 

Besides from Balstyrko the Danish acts are so far:

• Oh No Ono
• Mew
• Efterklang
• Choir Of Young Believers
• The Raveonettes
• The Late Parade

Mew and The Raveonettes are the ones who have received most recognition and attention outside Denmark while Choir of Young Believers, The Late Parade and Balstyrko are less established. Of the less known bands I´m looking most forward to see is Choir of Young Believers. 

Behind the misleading name is only one guy, Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, who is half-Greek, a quarter Indonesian and a quarter Danish. The music is melodic indie-folk-pop, with a very wistful sound to it and has nothing do with gospel-singing Christians. His last album is called "this is for the white in your eyes".

New album from Mew

I haven´t been listening to the indie-rock band Mew for a while, but apparently they are out with a new record this summer as a follow up to their 2005 album "The Glass Handed Kites". 

It will be their first album since the departure of their bass-player Johan Wohlert, who later teamed up with his girlfriend Pernille Rosendahl in the band The Storm. I was not very impressed with the music coming out of that collaboration, which was too pretentious and didn´t posses near the raw quality as Mew does. 

Mew was formed in 1995, and one of the songs I have heard the most is Apocalypso, and my favorite album is still Frengers from 2003. The Glass Handed Kites in my opinion exploded a bit too much in musical effects, instead of keeping it more simple. 

I just found out that Mew is huge in Japan and Mexico so it suddenly makes sense why one of my Mexican friends almost know more about the band than I do. On their webpage you can watch an artistic video-diary from their recent recordings in New York. 

The single Comforting Sounds from 2003 is too good not to be shared here. Notice the big, grandiose scarfs which became a common trademark of the four members. Even today six years later the lead singer Jonas Bjerre still looks like a innocent puppy that someone has treated wrongly.