Band Flies in From Norway to Say Hello and Goodbye
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Version 0 of 1. As high-profile debuts go, the circumstances could hardly be odder for Kaizers Orchestra’s first American performance, on Thursday evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The group, a Norwegian alternative-rock sextet whose music is an idiosyncratic amalgam of Scandinavian and Eastern European folk influences filtered through high-energy blues and metal, has had big musical ambitions: its last three albums were installments of “Violeta, Violeta,” a complex rock-opera that involves a dysfunctional family, Satan, vodka and a hefty dose of magical realism (a mother and daughter who can communicate only in dreams, for example). But though it has a huge following in Scandinavia and devoted audiences elsewhere in Europe, the group is virtually unknown in the United States, probably because it performs only in Norwegian. And while most groups’ debuts are introductions meant to build new audiences, the Kaizers’ Met performance — its only American date — is also its farewell. After a run of European festivals and nine valedictory performances in Stavanger, where it is based, Kaizers Orchestra is packing it in — or at least taking an open-ended break. “We don’t have any problems in the band,” Janove Ottesen, the group’s singer and principal composer, said in a Skype interview from Stavanger on Friday. “We’re not splitting the band. We’re just stopping touring, and stopping producing albums.” Mr. Ottesen and Geir Zahl — one of the group’s two guitarists, and Mr. Ottesen’s collaborator in a handful of bands since they were teenagers in Bryne, in southwest Norway — plan to transform “Violeta, Violeta” into a full-fledged music-theater piece. It will be their second, in a sense. In 2011 the Norwegian novelist Tore Renberg used material from the group’s first three albums — “Ompa Til Du Dor” (“Ompa Until You Die”), “Evig Pint” (“Eternally Tormented”) and “Maestro” — to create a musical, “Sonny.” This time Mr. Ottesen and Mr. Zahl are maintaining complete control. They have their work cut out for them: the three “Violeta, Violeta” albums do not present a linear narrative but rather random snapshots of a drama in which a couple splits and the father takes their daughter, Violeta, around the world while the mother tries to reconnect with her (and a dead twin daughter, also named Violeta) — with assistance from the Devil, who is trying to return to (and take over) heaven. The tale is so complicated that a fan-run Web site, kaizers.konzertjunkie.com, has proposed reshuffling the songs to present the plot more clearly. “The narrative is going to change completely,” Mr. Ottesen explained over a glass of wine at an Upper West Side restaurant soon after he arrived in New York on Monday. “There are so many stories we can tell. We’re in the process of choosing the best and strongest thread.” He said that he and Mr. Zahl expect the project to occupy them for the next decade. They also plan to translate the work so it could travel internationally. “I sing in Norwegian all the time,” Mr. Ottesen said in fluent English, “and when I perform live in, say, Germany, I know that they don’t understand anything I’m singing. I’m doing my job, singing and telling stories — and they’re good stories. The fans who understand it totally love it. They’re so into it, they tattoo the characters on their bodies. So it will really be exciting to have these stories understood outside Scandinavia.” Why has Kaizers Orchestra steadfastly maintained its Norwegian-only policy, particularly when Mr. Ottesen and Mr. Zahl have each independently made discs that are in fully idiomatic English? “Those albums are side projects,” Mr. Ottesen said. “Our main project is Kaizers Orchestra, where we have a whole world that we’ve created, and that world is in Norwegian. “Of course,” he continued, “we can express ourselves better in Norwegian, and we can write lyrics that have two, three or four layers, which is what I think makes a good lyric.” In musical terms Kaizers Orchestra is a band of polyglots. Arching melodic hooks are plentiful, as are arrestingly archaic rhythms: many of its songs are built around figures with accented weak beats of the kind that crop up in Kurt Weill’s early cabaret scores and in some Balkan dance forms. Mr. Zahl said during the Skype interview that he and Mr. Ottesen were not “directly inspired by that stuff, because we haven’t listened to it that much.” “We’re inspired by people who interpreted that music,” he said. Among the influences he mentioned were songs from the 1937 Disney film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”; music by Tom Waits; and English and American pop, rock and blues. “The essential thing is we love to combine,” Mr. Ottesen said. “We’re not trying to make classic pop songs. We like to take things from as many different genres as we can and put them in the same song.” Its sound palette brings together competing worlds, too. Against a crunchy wall of guitar timbre, provided by Mr. Zahl and Terje Wintersto Rothing, Oyvind Storesund plays a string bass. The centerpiece of Helge Risa’s keyboard arsenal is a wheezy pump organ. And Rune Solheim’s drumming is often augmented with clangorous beating on brake drums or by Mr. Ottesen and Mr. Zahl whaling on a pair of oil barrels. Perhaps the group’s sound and theatricality are infectious enough to render the language barrier irrelevant. That, at least, is the view of Limor Tomer, director of the Metropolitan Museum’s concerts and lectures department. “I find it liberating to listen to lyrics in a language I don’t understand,” Ms. Tomer said. “You’re not shackled to the spoken word. You can make your own narrative.” The group’s program will be a retrospective drawing on material from its full discography. “When you’re going to America for the first and last time,” Mr. Ottesen said, “playing all your best material feels like the right thing to do.” |