Lukestar

Lake Toba

(Flameshovel)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

It’s hard to come up with something new.  As the great Jenn Ghetto sang: “It’s hard to write this song / It’s all a joke / It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.”  The best most bands can hope for is to combine old things in a new way.  Unfortunately, a lot of these sonic chemists discover that new combinations aren’t always good ideas; just because your little kid (or college roommate) puts crushed Cheetos on his roast beef sandwich doesn’t make him a groundbreaking chef.

Oslo’s Lukestar are one of the happy exceptions to the rule.  Musically, they drew influence from Nirvana, clearly drawn to the idea that songs could be propulsive and loud but still have pop smarts.  There are moments of simple transcendence, then moments of jammed-out complexity, like a post-rock band coming out of their shell to embrace a more conventional but still powerful vein of indie-rock.  But Lukestar’s real head-turner is frontman Truls Heggero, who hits the sort of crazy falsetto heights that Sigur Ros’s Jonsi Birgisson frequents.  It’s a genuinely unexpected combination – even apparently to fans who have been on board since their early days.

Lake Toba starts out white-hot.   The album’s best songs come 1-2-3 – which, while it sets up some later hiccups in momentum, makes for an exhilarating entry stretch.  The band seems to be aware of this front-loading, as the first two tracks (“White Shade” and “Shape of Light”) are their lead singles.  The jagged guitars of “The Shade You Hide” provide an effect that’s part hip-hop and part strobe light.  All of their best tracks are characterized by big, dramatic choruses; a reference point would be Danish rockers Mew and their tracks like “The Zookeeper’s Boy.”

“White Shade” starts pastoral and pretty, with some underlying guitar crunch.  As Heggero croons in that sky-high falsetto – sounding like a creature of the woods or something – drummer Jørgen Smådal Larsen leads the band into a driving chorus and a fleeting math-rock jam.  Even when it hits the songs that didn’t get a dusting of pixie dust, Lake Toba is an air drummer’s delight through and through (forget taking it to karaoke, though).