Electropussy
At the Honeymoon Motel
VCA Records

I visited Molde some weeks ago, and went looking for vinyl records, as I always do, wherever I go. When visiting cities of Molde's size (20.000+) I don't expect to find much of interest though. But since the city of Molde hosts the annual Molde International Jazz Festival, one could hope. This festival makes the city stand on its head, and all the music journalists in the country praise the lively scene that appears there for one hot week every summer.

The rest of the year Molde is not so lively. This is how author and arctic traveller Tim Moore ironically described Molde in his book Frost on my Moustache: "a modern town of grandiose banality, curfew-empty at 5 p.m. The wet streets were clean, the civic lawns Austroturf perfect. There was no graffiti of any kind, not even on a town hall so insipid it deserved it. The abandoned taxis parked funereally by the port were all spotless new Mercedes. It was suddenly easy to imagine whole townfuls of Norwegians toying with bits of wire until someone accidentally invented the paperclip ... I got so bored wandering up and down its immaculate and anonymous main drag that I almost bought a pair of binoculars." Not a place where one would expect to find neither vinyl nor local bands worth spending time on, one would imagine ... but still: apart from about 20 newer vinyl releases of international artists in one store, I spotted this 10-inch vinyl record with hand-crafted cover art standing very alone in one of the city's other record stores. I couldn't resist ...

As I suspected, Electropussy proved to be a local band. I did not expect to find much about them on the web, but surprisingly (among some filthier sites) I discovered that most of these songs are also published by the band on MP3.com. One can also deduct that they have been at it for at least for three years, as another web page reports that they attended the local Bolgstock festival in 1998. Along the way they have changed their name to Exylophonics, released a demo CD in 1999 (I think) containing a song called Kengu og Kengubarnet kommer til skogen, og Nasse Nøff tar et bad (from Winnie-the-Pooh), and changed their name back to Electropussy again.

Influenced by artist as diverse as Dick Dale, No Means No, Elvis and Lee Scratch Perry, according to themselves, I wouldn't say any of these are an obvious musical reference. Surf/garage revivalists they may be, but they expand boldly into psychedelic, folk, and even prog. Anyway, it would anyway be a shame to stick any one label on this band - the seven tracks present here are an adventurous and colorful batch (as is the aforementioned cover art, which is almost worth the price alone). This all smells of DIY, but I wouldn't call the result lo-fi (what a strange and mis-used term, anyway!), because the sound here is very direct, very real, and transcends any limitations the cheap studio (Skorovass) may have posed.

Female singer Guro has a voice covering several moods, while the band as a whole play around and experiment within their formula, collecting some very catchy songs and themes along the way. I would also like to add Plan 9 as a reference, as Electropussy reminds me of them, much due to the organ/synth (like on the insanely great psych-trash of Get Down on Your Knees and Pray), but also because I get a feeling that Electropussy are more a hippie-zombie collective than your regular pop-group. From the beautiful and low-key, through the wacky and spacy, to the raw and dirty, Electropussy seem in full control - great stuff!

Visit the MP3 link above and check them out, or mail VCA records and ask for the vinyl, if you're old enough.

Copyright © 2000 Knut Tore Breivik