Origins NICE WEATHER FOR AIRSTRIKES
Instrumental post-rockers Rôka and Löki reassess their past.
Ahead of a new studio album slated for September, Nordic Giants have decided to undertake a little housekeeping, reshaping the earliest songs from their catalogue. Origins duly revisits 2010’s debut EP A Tree As Old As Me, plus both sides of standalone singles Shine and Speed The Crow’s Nest, alongside the epic Dark Clouds Mean War. All of these tracks predate the self-styled “claustrophobic cinema clutter” of their first album (2015’s A Séance Of Dark Delusions), prompting a sonic makeover more befitting of the inscrutable duo’s recent work.
Freshly recorded guitars, piano, synths, drums and strings give these songs a greater dynamic range –and a crisper, cleaner fidelity –that serve to bridge the furthest extremes of the Giants’ sound. Huge, dramatic swells heighten the urgency of opening cut Together, which uses samples from key Martin Luther King speeches, particularly 1967’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ address. An intense ride, the music underscores society’s need for ‘a radical revolution of values’ and the imminent peril of being ‘dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.’ It’s a call to humanity, and a quest for moral conviction, that still resonates, of course. And one that the Giants would repeat on A Séance Of Dark Delusions, whose similarly-pointed Spirit also samples MLK.
By contrast, Rod Steiger’s impassioned turn as Napoleon in 1970’s Waterloo, making hi
