Nanook Of the North - The Täby Tapes

Artist: Nanook Of the North Title: The Täby Tapes Catalog#: AHA!058 Price: $10.00	Tracks on this CD:
	Reaching the Shores Of Arlanda
	Karin Boye's Grave
	Israel and Palestine - A Solution
	Nanook's Ark
	Phonecall
	St. George and the Dragon
	Näsby Park
	Hey Fragile
	Where Will You Go?
	Nanook and the Beast
	The Explorer
	Forget It Jenny, Love Is Just a Privilege For the Rich

The resulting album is a true treasure from these ancient lands in which our hero finds that navigating one's own heart can be far more challenging than traveling halfway around the world. "The Täby Tapes" is proof positive that truth is stranger than fiction. If you think this story is unbelievable, then just wait until you hear the record!!

Many musical guests include Pea Hix (Optiganally Yours/Physics/Tit Wrench), JFRE 'robot' Coad (Aspects of Physics/ Physics/Lesser), and a cast of strikingly talented female singers that you haven't heard of previously, like Camela Leierth, Karin Engstrand, Irma Schultz, Malin Olofsson, Jennie Löbel, and Akaba.

This is a simply gorgeous record - one of the best things I've heard since that initial envelope arrived at Parasol in January of 2003. It's been on my weekly Top Ten list constantly since that time. Whenever customers come in the store when NOTN is playing, they stop to ask us about it. Many of these folks ask us every week, "When's that Nanook Of The North CD coming out." The impact of The Taby Tapes is just that immediate; it really catches the ear! I believe what has become a very special record for me, will have a similar effect on many Parasolarians. Nanook Of The North will appeal to a wide range of listeners spanning fans of Postal Service's playskool pop, The Delgados' boy-girl duality, Múm's fractured, chilly Nordic electronics, Moonbabies all-encompassing originality, and lovers of the tender, downtrodden dreamer "from Alingsäs to the stars!"

The CD's deluxe packaging features images of Taby photographed by Nanook alternating between printed translucent sheets. These photos were the source of inspiration that prompted Nanook to begin writing, so we wanted to do something special with the booklets to do them justice... and let the story unfold from there!

Sweden has become so well known for its volume-heavy hard rock, aggressive garage punk and raging metal that it's easy to forget that the Nordic hoardes are just as good at softer sounds. (After all, the lounge pop of the Cardigans helped kick off Western interest in Scandinavian rock.) The Täby Tapes, the debut from Nanook of the North, is a perfect example. Sounding in spots not unlike 80s icon the Dream Academy, the delicately arranged swirl of acoustic guitars and analogue synthesizers that make up the bulk of the music rarely raises above a conversational volume level, letting the hooks gently shake hands and pat you lightly on the shoulder instead of slapping you in the face. But, as with the work of the deceptively quiet Prefab Sprout, another touchstone, that doesn't mean the intensity level is as sedate as the sonics. Supposedly a travelogue from Nanook, the Inuit star of the famous 1922 documentary, The Täby Tapes is actually a concept album about living in small town Sweden (Täby being a Stockholm suburb). Multi-instrumentalists Mattias Olsson and Olle Söderström, joined by various Swedish sirens on duet vocals, paint a picture of life in the Nordic climes that seems alternately lifeless ("Where Will You Go?"), depressing ("Näsby Park," with its refrain "We don't need a Berlin wall/To make you stay in this sad, sad, sad, sad, sad place") and downright terrifying "(Hey Fragile," whose lilting melody belies the lyrics' ugly portrait of emotional abuse). At first Nanook is staunch is his quest for peace and love, quoting the Beatles in "Nanook's Ark" and negotiating the complex pathways of affection in "St George and the Dragon" and "Israel and Palestine - A Solution." But ultimately it comes down to lines like "Well, sex might be OK but love - get real/Face it, it's not meant for you and me Jenny" in "Forget It Jenny, Love is Just a Privilege For the Rich," as our narrator gives in to despair despite the best efforts of his partner to lighten his mood. "Well, I'll erase the filth of this barren place with something beautiful," she croons, to no avail. That the downcast sentiments are couched in such sweet, lovely melodies makes the album an even more remarkable achievement. Brilliant, sobering and beautiful.

"The Täby Tapes chronicles the travels of young Nanook, an Eskimo boy, from Alaska to Täby, Sweden. It's a love story, in a way, with duelling, sing-songy boy-girl vocals at which Delgados fans will sigh dreamily. This is a daydream of a concept record wrapped up in a country boy's travels in suburbia, complete with beautiful photography of Taby's stark cityscapes. Chock-full with the feeling of awestruck discovery, The Taby Tapes is a unique musical experience, tackling a variety of subjects, from the common themes of love and loss to a song titled "Israel and Palestine - A Solution" that says bluntly, through the relationship between the alternatingly gendered lines, 'Spare parts/Without each other we're useless, abused, and starved/We're the engine of a broken heart...', suggesting the conflict, in actuality, has more to do with loneliness than anything. Interesting at best, but profound in delivery all the way through, this record's songs are wistful and sonically beautiful in their unique instrumentation - haunting horns and Postal Service-like blips set beneath delicately orchestrated, mostly acoustic melody. The songs are as fragile as Taby's subject, the overall product of which is well worth its 38 minutes, and by the time it's done, you've either been saddeningly downtrodden by the city or overwhelmed with discovery. Either way, you can breathe easily - this one's a keeper."

Eskimos are hardly ubiquitous in popular culture. They inspired that legend about having 85 million different words for snow, helped name an ice-cream snack and provided grossly stereotypical supporting characters for a plethora of cartoons, but that’s about it.

So when Nanook of the North taps into the world of Inuit lore on The Täby Tapes, there’s little cultural baggage to deal with on its debut. In fact, the Swedish band’s angle, that a pair of rockers met namesake Nanook at a party and coerced him into recording the tales of his travels from his arctic homeland to the Swedish suburb of Täby where they crossed paths with him. Luckily for the band’s entire concept, Nanook had a lot more to talk about than hunting whales in a kayak, building igloos and snow. In fact, he turns out to be one well traveled dude with some stories of love and worldly struggles to round things out.

With a sound that teeters between the cutesy indie pop of Death Cab for Cutie and Dntel’s indietronica, The Täby Tapes almost begs for a comparison to The Postal Service. That’d be taking the easy way out, however, as The Täby Tapes’ textures only approximates the Jimmy Tamborello/Benjamin Gibbard project. Heavier on the organic side of songwriting, Nanook of the North features light, lilting guitar figures and gentle bass melodies while the mysterious Nanook and Malin Olofsson trade boy-girl vocals with a casual ease that recalls The Delgados’ most collaborative affairs or, at times, the crisp pop of Swedish popsters Club 8. At times, the band opts for purely organic sounds, as in “Israel and Palestine ­ a Solution,” a number that mixes a rat-a-tat snare with the breezy keys for a somber, but not repressed number. Others, such as the brief segue “Nanook and the Beast,” place overlapping bits of Nanook’s lyrics, organ drones and electronic ambience atop one another for a sonic collage.

The band’s at its best, however, when its organic and electronic elements struggle for dominance. “Näsby Park,” places fragile guitar figures over an imposing electronic drone that slowly builds into an impenetrable wall of analog-synth noise. “Phonecall” thrives on its densely packed production, which places a crisp acoustic guitar over a pastiche of keyboards, electronic effects and ambient sounds. It’s enough to make the act sound like the younger, scrawny cousin of American bands like The Postal Service or Blusom.

Eskimos? Nanook hardly has time for his homeland or culture, which fortunately leaves room for the longing pop of which he mastered. Once again, the arctic’s left out of popular culture, but few people, outside of cultural pundits will notice, let alone care that Nanook’s travels have little, if anything, to do with his upbringing or the 1922 documentary from which the band takes its name.

With the advent of summer this week, I'm looking for music that will capture coolness in aural form--something that will complement the air conditioner, iced tea and general avoidance of the daylight hours. I'm looking for something that will soothe and chill without the heaviness of classical music or the mindlessness of lite jazz. I'm wanting something that will give me goosebumps and will leave me seeking out a jacket and a young lady to spend a quality afternoon with eating cheese and drinking white wine.

Of course, why not look to Sweden? They've certainly done quite well in the past, delivering drop-dead coolness like ABBA, The Cardigans, Club 8 and The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, and I've got no fear in saying that if it comes from Sweden then it's probably going to be cool. It's certainly the case with The Taby Tapes, because Nanook and his cast of characters have made a record that's chilled out in a electronica pop kind of way, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Gentle strings are mixed with washes of keyboards and acoustic guitar, and on songs like "Nanook's Ark" and "Hey Fragile," the combination is simply beautiful.The Taby Tapes is a concept album of sorts, detailing Nanook's journey from Alaska to Taby, Sweden. Okay, I'll confess that I don't really follow the "concept," but with pop songs this sticky-sweet, who cares?

The ideas behind The Taby Tapes may be thin, but the music sure isn't. Comparisons have been made to Mum, The Delgados and The Postal Service--all bands with smooth electronics and gorgeous, sleepy vocals--but I'm thinking Cowboy in Sweden. Mix in a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, a whole lot of Nordic influence, and voila! Nanook has a husky yet charming voice that reminds me a bit of a more sedate Lee Hazelwood--listen to the boy/girl singing on "Israel and Palestine-A Solution" and try to convince me that this isn't a modern day Lee and Nancy we're dealing with here. (This whole concept of pop music telling a story seems like it would be right up his alley, too.)

The Taby Tapes is nothing more and nothing less than a very pretty album of electronica-tinged indiepop. Don't worry about the themes of the album, and don't worry if the concept of the record doesn't make any sense to you, because the music makes up for it all. Thankfully, Nanook arrived just in time for the summer--come on in, the snow is fine!

The effectiveness of the summertime pop song hinges on matters of geography. When one lives far from the equator, summer represents a brief interval of heat and life after countless dreary, snowy nights. Is there a better time to appreciate the bright and bouncy pop of the Cars or the New Pornographers than in these brief few carefree months of warm summer breezes?

Closer to the equator, for instance here in the southernmost tip of Florida, summer is not a brief moment of sunshine and joy. For those of us cursed to live somewhere where the term "endless summer" means a brutal seven-to-ten months of crushing, oppressive heat, summer songs seem to mock our weary, dehydrated existence. For the eternally sunstroked, relief from the rising heat index is on its way in the form of the debut album from Swedish band Nanook of the North. With its American release date set in the middle of July, the month of the triple digit temperatures. The Täby Tapes is the perfect summer album for people who loathe the summer.

Nanook of the North, theoretically, is fronted by Nanook himself, an Eskimo who traveled from Alaska to Täby, a suburb of Stockholm. The rather dubious story behind The Täby Tapes is that musicians Mattias Olsson and Olle Söderström discovered him singing a song cycle about his epic journey and quickly decided to grab a pickup truck full of "indie" electronics (including, of course, a Theremin) and record his powerful and evocative tunes with him. The whole concept behind the album reeks of gimmickry, even if the whole bizarre back story turns out to be true. In fact, it actually hurts the album as a whole, which is not even explicitly about Eskimo culture. The character and/or "real person" Nanook is a stranger in the place he lives; city life makes him feel disconnected from his roots, and that evokes more universal emotions than the "one Eskimo's journey" the band history promises.

The Eskimo feel comes less in the words than in the music. Nearly every song begins with Nanook singing and strumming his guitar, with only spare instrumentation: a drum machine, maybe, or a lonely keyboard line. The songs then build and build with more and more instruments, horns and guitars pile on top of one another, building into intense climaxes. This wall-of-sound approach works perfectly in capturing the feel of winter, particularly the bitterly cold winters of Alaska and Sweden, while also reflecting Nanook's growing sense of isolation and homelessness. The music is grand and impersonal, like gigantic ice castles, and conveys boundless emotion without allowing the heat of passion. Bolstered by the sweeping orchestration, the songs play like pocket symphonies; Nanook never has to raise his voice above an underplayed, throaty whisper.

Nanook, though isolated, is not alone as he is accompanied by about a half-dozen female singers. In some songs, they represent Nanook's homeland. In other songs, they stand in for the city of Täby itself. Of course, in many of the songs, the women are just women (although, in the case of Camela Leierth's turn on "Karin Boye's Grave", that does not mean that they are necessarily living women).

Although the female part comes from a different perspective on each song, and is sung by several different singers, the whole album plays like a dialogue between Nanook and this multifaceted female presence. Most disturbingly, on the uncomfortably triumphant "St. George and the Dragon", the female voice becomes a "beast" he must slay, despite her protests that she is "just a girl" and "unarmed". By the closing track, "Forget It Jenny, Love is Just a Privilege for the Rich" (which, coincidentally, is the best song title Stephin Merritt never wrote) it becomes clear that the female parts form the second half of an ongoing debate, as the poor Nanook swears off love because "love requires time and time is money" while Jenny (played/sung by Malin Olofsson) sings of the possibilities of love to transcend the social environment and "erase the filth of this barren place / With something beautiful". The album, as it should, ends in a stalemate between the two conflicting voices. A brief, mechanical blip acts as a coda.

While every song works as an individual piece of music, the breaks between the songs seem rather arbitrary. At a little more than thirty minutes, the album deserves to be listened to as it was conceived: as a song cycle. Even "Hey Fragile", the clear album highlight thanks to a guitar line that achieves the infamous "blue water" sound demanded by Jimi Hendrix, sounds best followed by the brooding "Where Will You Go?" The charms of Nanook of the North are entirely mp3-resistant. Approached as a single musical entity, The Täby Tapes perfectly conveys the beauty, as well as the physical and mental pains, of a bitter winter, and what better time to appreciate the joys and pains of winter than during the most hostile days of summer? There will be time enough for the Beach Boys come December.

Named after the famous landmark anthropological film made by Robert Flaherty in 1922, which captured the plight of Nanook an Inuit hunter trying to provide for his family amid the Artic extremes of the Hudson Bay. The plight of the Artic dwellers has never really featured greatly in pop music over the years, you’d have to trawl back to the Residents formidable album ‘Eskimos’ to perhaps have the final word. Mind you all that’s a matter of conjecture where Nanook of the North are concerned.

‘The Taby Tapes’ concerns itself in love, peace and solutions to the world’s ills, and it’s a gracious adventure captured across twelve tracks clocking in at a brief 30 odd minutes. Obscuring their melodies with a shy tenderness, Nanook of the North play exquisite variants of Celtic folk accompanied by the atmospheric additives of theremins, stylophones, moogs and brass arrangements. "Karin Boyes Grave" strangely absorbs a mystical charm, so sweetly feint tiny spacey swirls waltz affectionately around the bitter sweet harmonies, it’s like the Carpenters meeting Donny and Maria head on at a love in. "Spare parts (Israel vs Palestine; a solution)" temptingly courts with the Waterboys covering the Go Betweens back catalogue with traces of Kate Bush’s "Hounds of Love" chasing the prey. Best moment though is the elegantly pained "Nanook’s Ark" which pinpoints the essence of classic Prefab Sprout at McAloon’s most brutally open, the romantic interplay of the male / female vocals caress the Christmas like symphonies happily fan-faring beneath. "Phonecall" lifts elements of "Grocer Jack" and works them into their delightful twee core to amazing effect.

"Hey Fragile" I could play all night, if only for the dreamy slide guitar which always works wonders here, airy dynamics pepper this tasty morsel which sometimes sounds like it was recorded underwater, did anyone say Deacon Blue, you could be right. "Where will you go?" dips in for a spot of Eastern mysticism courtesy of the Beatles "Within you without you" while incorporating a macabre like suspense themology that every now and again flitters to magically fluffy orchestrations that leave you breathless. Romantically tender, lovers of the Prefabs, Go Betweens, Deacon Blue and the Dream Academy will swoon.

Official band photo:

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