AqPop - Beautifully Smart
(35g)
After a couple of sprightly EPs and highlight tracks on both International League of Telepathic Explorers compilations, Norway’s AqPop (formerly Chime Poppers and Aquarium Poppers) present their debut full length. Comparisons with their Trondheim neighbors, Dipsomaniacs are perhaps inevitable, as singer/songwriter/guitarist Thor Jørgen Holm is Dipso leader, Øyvind’s brother and their keyboardist, Thomas Henriksen contributes some playful keyboards on the catchy, pop/psych opener, “Have It.” But the band forge their own identity on the storming instrumental, “Radio 60,” copping riffs left and right from The Beatles, Kinks and probably a couple of other original Brit-Poppers (sorry!) in the process. Holm’s own snap-happy, cheesy keys turns “Screen” in to a happy-feet winner, while drop-dead gorgeous Jade Hasselgård’s harmonies provide a refreshing spark to the title track, “Beautifully Smart, She’s Standing There” and her opening piano fills add a melancholic touch to her wistfully romantic, proggy centerpiece, “The Day.”
And dig her operatic solo opening to “Caught By This Feeling,” a song co-written by the Holm brothers and fellow AqPop guitarist, Karl Morten Dahl, and so completely rearranged from the version that appears on the Dipso’s latest, Praying Winter, as to be a totally new song. Whether this was intentional to distinguish it from the earlier-released version or whether this is the way it was “supposed” to sound like all along doesn’t really matter. My advice is to sit back and enjoy both.
Dahl and Holm’s twin-guitar attack drives the punchy, hard rocking “Command Smile:able” on the back of Andreas Knudsen’s rolling drum fills, and their slow, deliberate change-of-pace “Syranid” combines Holm’s creepy, haunted-house organ with swirling guitar pyrotechnics and Hasselgård’s angelic harmonies for another monolithic prog monster. [Note to dudes: let’s give Jade more to do next time!] Overall, a rewarding debut that more than fulfills their early promise and yet more evidence that Norwegian rock is so much more than foo-foo electronic cheese wiz from Bergen. Trondheim Rules!
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