It's Album Time With Todd Terje Is Still Every Bit As Cool As Its Name Implies
The Norwegian Space Disco Romp Is Jarring In Its Punch-Drunk Stylings, But That’s What Makes It Work
Tristan Young @talltristan
There’s an old episode of The Simpsons in which the family is driving home after Homer’s misfortunes as part of the- err, traveling attractions- at Lollapalooza. Marge ponders the fleeting and ephemeral nature of being cool. “Am I cool kids?” she asks Bart and Lisa displaying a naive earnestness the show rarely rewards. “No”, the two reply with deadpan derision. “Good I’m glad,” Marge responds, “And that’s what makes me cool right? Not caring”. Once again a cold and dismissive, “No”, from her children. Marge grows understandably frustrated by the vague complexities of the concept. “Well how the hell do you be cool then? I feel like we’ve tried everything!” Such is the dilemma of artists in many fields and mediums. Sure no one would refer to those pursuances in such juvenile and elemental terms. Rather business acumen adopts phrases like ‘trendy’ or ‘forward looking’. But it’s all derived from the same basic tenants of being cool. Many artists are concerned with and motivated by the idea at least on subconscious, if not commercial level. To be accepted, more or less. Todd Terje is not one of them. He is not cool and he knows this. This does not make him cool. It makes him think it’s a fine idea to name an album simply It’s Album Time With Todd Terje. This makes him fantastic.
Terje Olsen has been a fixture in his native Norwegian music industry for several decades and helped if not popularize, at least closer define the burrowing and deeply niche genre space disco. Spreading it’s influence throughout the Scandinavian music scene, space disco is a subset of the slightly more comprehensible Italio disco, and itself an evolution of it. It takes the combined notions of Western European hedonism, funk laced pop, drum machines, synthesisers, and vocoders and gives it slightly more sci-fi and cosmic vibe. More robust electro pop, spaced out synth and densely mutated vocoded lyrical samples. Splashes of psychedelia and eastern prog rock give it it’s own eclectic if intentionally gaudy personality. Integrally, it also conveys its rhythms with a somewhat retrograde look on all things cosmic and high-tech. Think of the paleo-futuristic tone of the Jettsons but with more cocktails and you are getting somewhere. Olsen was by no means the first to coin or delve into the disorienting markers of space disco, but It’s Album Time is perhaps its most triumphant rendition.
Olsen’s path along this style of music and the attendant quirky personalities that come with it was by no means assured. While he made a name for himself in the early 2000s in his home of Norway if not further aboard, it was primarily through remixes and covers of electronic music. While the glamorous and kitschy elements of space disco always ingrained themselves in one way or another into his reimagining of existing tracks, he was content for the most part with revisions and local DJ sets. His stage name, Todd Terje, even was a homage to legendary New York 80s house producer Todd Terry who himself was a big proponent of Italio Disco. Beyond that he wasn’t quite sure what was to be done with his peculiar sets of musical proclivities. Olsen wasn’t initially motivated to make an actual album, and as such struggled to articulate what, if anything he could do in that arena. Prior to the shape of things to come in It’s Album Time he envisioned a record akin to a cinematic journey full of theatrics and synchronous pacing, but that idea never really worked out.
It’s by inverting such an endeavour, searching instead for its antithesis, that Olsen found the style for It’s Album Time. The LP, as he describes it, is referred to as a cosmic library record. A library record is generally the kind of music you would use to describe a visual scene in a film. Think what you might hear in the library or walking down the street; less the cinematic score and more the benign soundtrack. Now combine that with the wild audacity of space disco and the radiant core of this album takes shape. This mindset helps make sense of the surreal cocktail hour by way of get away music of Alfonso Muskendunder, or the stairway, not so much to heaven, but into space created by the dazzling harps in Swing Star Part 2. It has an unassuming insouciance for much of it, such as inanely inviting Latin fiesta of Svesnk Sas or the increasingly silly whispers like some kind of 80s sitcom in the opening track It’s Album Time. Of course this is not an album you need to make sense of , not for the most part. It communicates less in theme and more in style; what makes it remarkable is it’s a style that few others have been able to express with such confidence.
Indeed it would require some level of self-assurance to make an album that is so unabashedly quirky, downright nerdy even. Sure it has the slick appeal of space disco rendered with a delicate mastery. Tracks like Delorean Dynamite offer soft synth pallets and filigreed footwork of the guitar along its flattened waveform curvature. You could also point to the conga line percussion and soul drenched bass of Strandbar that eventually get’s washed out by the stunning finesse of its gymnastic piano clips. Yet for every illuminating dose of cosmic wonderment, its grandeur is intentionally undercut by the slapstick trickery of 8-bit glitchtronica. A squelching synth sporadically interrupts those same transcendent piano sequences in Strandbar and they sound like an Owen Wilson meme that makes it even more fun. This is an album that is not afraid to be goofy or dorky, rather it embraces the concept arguing that the further along that path you travel you can discover some truly remarkable sonic ideas. Furthermore those quirky sensibilities are not smoothed out or rendered broadly palatable, but left in tact to brandish their granular eccentricities. Leisure Suit Preban has a bizarre xylophone strut and elevator music drawl that would engender empathetic cringes were it not for the confident waltz of the whole thing. The song is modeled after the long obsolete videogame character Leisure Suit Larry who was defined by his clumsy and oafish attempts at casual leisure and hedonism. He was of course not particularly successful at either, which is contextually perfect this whole album. Songs like that have that culture of artificial wealth and luxury but supplants the sumptuous exotica for inviting playfulness.
That dynamic shift registers more and more through the increasingly exaggerated bouts of nerd core pop spliced with lavishly imagined melodies. Our allegorical friend Preban returns with Preban Goes to Acapulco brandishing garish cyclical scales and a straight up glockenspiel that sill manages to turn into something cosmically assured by the end of it’s wild journey. Delorean Dynamite has faux funk guitars and 80s synth pop that embraces it’s own slight obnoxiousness to such an extent it would make the cast of Miami Vice blush; all you can do is admire the audacity of it. The unmitigated joy of Inspector Norse doesn’t even need or try to begin with taking some idea of hip and exaggerating it beyond logic. Instead the tune is comprised entirely of spritely beats and bops that propagate seemingly at random. Eventually enough of them fill the space to a point that they just will a beat into existence. Every goofy blip and little glitch is so lovingly accentuated and vibrant it’s hard not to get swept up in its unflinching- commanding even- optimism. Alfonso Muskundender certainly swings for the fences when exploring just how weird you can get while still taking everyone along for the ride. It’s like the intro of an alternate reality- one consumed by chaos- 70s game show on amphetamine. The gaudy musical theatre strut of the pianos requires a double take but there’s little time to analyze that, yes this is actually ridiculously fun, before the vocoder hums that are so processed you’re not sure they were ever human kick in. You won’t have to when the surreal a capella accompaniment overlaps. This is barely even scratching the surface of the track.
It’s Album Time With Todd Terje isn’t so much an exercise in what others can’t, but what others won’t. By embracing the gleefully lame ponderings of electronic music and letting them flourish without ego or id, Olsen crafts a wildly textural album. Every sequencer, bass line, and string sequence glows, pops, or cracks with stunning fidelity. The arpeggios in Swing Star Part 1, Oh Joy, and Preban Goes To Acapulco require a double take, encourages it even as you can distinctly register every string being glamorously plucked. The jaunting piano of Strandbar will give you goose bumps to match the smoothed scales like a kind of audible contact high. The blossoming congas that intersect with the lavish synth wails in Oh Joy gives so much depth to a climax that satirizes the shallow manipulations of 80s hair metal. For all that is going on in Alfonso Muskundunder, it benefits greatly from the low end friction of the synth that gets dialled all the way up to sonic distortion towards its increasingly mollifying crescendo. The sharper more perforated synth in Delorean Dynamite has an interesting granular snarl to it that adds a great deal of definition to the hyper polished track. Most notably, it’s hard to overstate the extent to which Olsen imbues nearly every note in Inspector Norse with pulsing, if endearingly bumbling personality. It’s with all of these explicitly defined layers that ensures that while It’s Album Time may be intentionally cheesy it never comes off as in excess of it.
The album certainly has no qualms about leaning into that cheesy demeanour though. This is basically the musical interpretation of the old guy in a Hawaiian shirt at a party that’s sticks out like a sore thumb but at least he’s got a fresh mai tai. He’s having a good time, he’s not hurting anyone, so he may as well embrace it. You can hear it in the over the top balladry akin to a Van Halen or Journey song in Oh Joy. However the climatic drum fills at the end bring it to such heights you find yourself in retrospect wondering why you ever questioned its melodramatic and lofty intentions. The opening siren call of It’s Album Time just can’t be serious but those tense and tawdry guitar licks assure you that it absolutely is. The samba style energy Svensk Sas is laundered through Northern European awkwardness and embellishes its unapologetically inviting candour. The doo-wop allure that descends into a melodically tuned acid trip in Alfonso Muskendunder is as strange as it comes, but the song has no reservations about completely owning it. Preban Goes To Acapulco may seem alienating in its oddities at first but the coalescence of rising scales towards it’s middle section are undeniably illuminating. That seems to be a recurring experience through out much of the album; by embracing and exploring such taboo notions of garish tastelessness and filtering them through his technical prowess Olsen hones in on the perfect synthesis of silly and yet oddly compelling.
Marius aka Inspector Norse in WHATEVERST
Beyond the rhetorical ambition behind such an endeavour, It’s Album Time is also an unmistakeably beautiful album. Forget the hyper exaggerated klutziness to it, or the satirical dressing down of luxury pop and cultural affluence, it just sounds lovely. The soft and understated tones of It’s Album Time glow with a barely out of focus haze, causing their twinkle to diffract through the beat. The rippling pools of minor notes in Swing Star Part 2 descend the scale with a sombre and dutiful parade amidst the vibrating charisma of the rest of the track. Strandbar glistens in it’s own jubilant regalia as the pianos take over the melody like a monolithic yet still benevolent force. The secondary rhythm of synth scales mixing with the ecstatic percussion in Oh Joy seems to revel in its fiery incarnation and it’s hard not to get swept up in it. The unrepentant glee of Inspector Norse, even as it’s mid track mini drop brings it down from space into the dance floor, is lovingly captured. No matter which angle you approach it from, nearly the whole album is a gluttonous offering of gilded edges, ornate arrangements and crystalized synthesizers.
Almost, but not all, as there is an intriguing anomaly nestled in the center of the album that appears in almost every way anathema to the sonic designs of It’s Album Time. Johnny And Mary is the only song on the album that has actual vocals. To be specific it is the cover of an old Robert Palmer song performed in this case by Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music fame. The original Palmer iteration was a proto new wave croon fest, but the cover here is extremely forlorn. Ferry sounds excessively sad, his voice hollowed out and exhausted. The melody and his vocals, beautiful as they are in an anodyne and academic sort of way, are devoid of any of the garish flare of the rest of the album; stripped down to their core frame and exhumed as a critique on hopeless romanticism. If the majority of this album, as represented by the childish hijinks of Leisure Suit Preban, is an exercise in blatant optimism, Johnny And Mary serves as a potential and logical conclusion long down the line. The piano balladry is lovely but somnolent and morose, eulogizing the frivolous dreams of youth back when they seemed attainable.
While this seems like an earnest and perhaps prophetic take on things it still sticks out like a sore thumb and inspires some incredulous wondering as why it needs to be here. However Johnny and Mary does not exist in the vacuum within It’s Album Time that its aesthetic markers may imply. If that track is the most disillusioned and demoralized, Inspector Norse is the most unambiguously joyous, and yet they share some thematic similarities on a meta-textural level. One is encouraged to look deeper into the compendium material for the album and view a short film that serves as a long form video for the whole album called WHATEVEREST (the specific video for Inspector Norse is cut as truncated version of the film). The film follows the days in and days out of a person named Marius that may or not by fictional; he goes by the titular alias Inspector Norse, thus the song is dedicated to him. Once brimming with dreams of moving to the city to pursue his hopes of being a DJ, Marius finds himself compelled to stay in his small village to care for his sick father. From there he falls into predicable rhythms that become inescapable ruts. Chores and time with father in the day, cooking up off brand faux-designer drugs by night. The long Scandinavian evenings serve as a backdrop to the oppressive solitude he finds himself isolated within. His life is ostensibly unfulfilling, and yet Marius finds his own kind of respite. Anytime he puts on his headphones or listens to music he opens a pathway to genuine catharsis. Does he look out of place and downright foolish- yes, sure. But as the album stresses so thoroughly, that shouldn’t matter.
Still, the parallels to a 27 year old that has crafted a metaphorical heap of things in life that have not gone his way and the saccharine gloom of Johnny and Mary are hard to ignore. One can take comfort in the idea that in both cases they truly, admirably, couldn’t have cared less if anyone thought they were cool or not. It’s that sentiment that brings us back to the conclusion of our initial allegory. Homer, in solidarity with a slightly irate Marge posits, “Wait a minute Marge. Maybe if you’re really cool, you don’t need to be told”. Bart and Lisa are having none of this. “Well sure you do. How else would you know?”