Don Ignacio's Music Reviews

This Is... Icona Pop 2013 ★★

Icona Pop. No relation to Iggy Pop. They’re an electronic pop duo from Sweden whose hit song “I Love It,” a collaboration from Charli XCX, sent dance-floor people into a tizzy. Maybe because dance-floor people are easily startled by loud noises and emotional destruction. It’s a fairly simple song: monotonous drum rhythm, droning synthesizers, loud emotionless vocals. Pretty good hook, though. Fair enough. Good pop has been molded out of less. The problem is that roughly the same description applies to “All Night,” “We Got the World,” “Girlfriend,” “In the Stars,” “On a Roll,” “Hold On,” “Light Me Up,” and “Then We Kiss.” That’s right, I just named most of the album. The vocals just loud and shouty without anything distinctive about them. “Just Another Night” is the closest thing here to a ballad, which means it’s still basically the same thing except nobody is expected to dance. “Ready for the Weekend,” meanwhile, earns special notice for being irritating with a hellish groove and a little Auto-Tuned goblin voice threaded through it like evil dental floss. Otherwise, mostly fine. The hooks are there. The energy is there. Didn’t hate it. I just wish the songs didn’t keep attacking the same square inch of my skull with the same chilly ice hammer. Enjoyable in blasts. Maybe we like “I Love It.”

Emergency 2015 ★★★

EP

I always love being surprised by a release from an artist I started out not liking. This is only a three-song EP, but Icona Pop are working in genres I actually enjoy here, and their voices aren’t as shouty or tiresome as I expected. The title track is the keeper—a party-pop attack with electro-swing in the vein of Caravan Palace: bright and brassy, with a ragtimey plink-plonk piano rhythm and lively vocals. Funny, I guess, since the first thing I noticed about Caravan Palace was that their name reminded me of the Canterbury prog outfit Caravan—just as I first tried Icona Pop because the name looked vaguely like Iggy Pop. My ongoing experiment in “you can’t judge a book by a cover that vaguely reminds you of the cover of another book” continues. The other two tracks don’t leave as much of a dent, although they’re not bad. The third is “Clap Snap,” a reworking of that old playground chant “The Clapping Song.” The Belle Stars already gave me the only electronic version of that I’ll ever need, but this has that modern dance-club rhythm these dang millennials like dancing to. Dang millennials.

Så Mycket Bättre 2017 – Tolkningarna 2017 ★★½

EP

This EP comes from Så mycket bättre, a Swedish reality show where artists reinterpret one another’s songs. I can’t even keep up with the American ones, so I’m not going to start with the Swedish ones, but there’s apparently a whole slew of these EPs floating around streaming platforms. Despite the title and the intended audience, only two of the eight tracks are actually in Swedish. The rest is in good old English, which, as we all know, is the language of God. Musically, Icona Pop sound a little less trapped inside their usual shout-machine. The production is still electronic, still glossy, still big. But the songs have much more of an indie-pop flavor than the debut, and the vocals get a little more breathing room. “Don’t Slam the Door” is the best song, mainly because it has the strongest hook—at least to my ears. The rest of it is decent enough. More distinct than their earlier album. Less exhausting in places. Some instrumental touches keep the songs from blending together too much. But it still has that problem. There’s just not enough lift.

Club Romantech 2023 ★★★

I like this one a surprising amount. Not wildly. Not enough to have it played at my funeral. But more than I expected. I don’t think of myself as the target audience. I’m sitting in my basement listening to Icona Pop the way I listen to prog records. I should be listening to this in a nightclub. With Chris Kattan by my side, spraining my neck, doing a poor job of impressing the ladies. This is dance-pop with club bones—though not quite the sleek, smooth grooves I associate with the genre, based on my extensive research, which consists mostly of having seen A Night at the Roxbury. The beat is there. The Euro-pop instincts are there. But the instrumentation is messier and more off-center: little synth textures, buzzing parts, decorative electronic junk rattling around. That’s what keeps me interested. Plus, the club beats know how to propel things. I’m not sure there’s a song here I’ll keep returning to. But as crooked club music goes, it gives us what we need.