Pinkunoizu | PEEP EP

This new Danish quartet assert themselves with an audacious, fully-realized debut EP.

Most likely to: appear in the Rexly feed of the only person in your local state college’s English department that actually deserves to be there.

For the “tl;dr” types in my audience, I’ll start with a conclusion: Pinkunoizu embody the casual, effortless touch of brilliance that is ever-present in the colder regions of Europe in a way that could make them their very own archetype.

This isn’t surprising. I, for one, have very few gripes with the Nordic peoples (a term I use to describe a greater portion of the globe than one may assume) when it comes to their art. No matter if the subject is furniture, fashion or music—if it comes with an umlaut nearby, you can safely assume that it will dwell somewhere in the spiritual overlap of elegance and functionality. And despite the oddly vulgar-to-the-tongue banner of the name “Pinkunoizu,” the Peep EP mines the myth of the North’s frigid delicacies further in three tracks than a great many of this year’s releases have done for their gene pools, despite greater measures of sound and wasted fury.

“Time Is Like a Melody” opens with a descent into a shimmering nether world. Pinkunoizu’s constructs are cold caves of melody and dissonance working against each other as a means to achieve a harmonious end that, while experienced and in retrospect, makes perfect sense. This is borderline chamber music; a concerto written by an ascetic hermit who’s read the terror in the shadows cast by his tallow. Each song comes in movements, unsettling at first, quietly crafting tensioned atmospherics through subtle, thin, acoustic means. They build upon these twinkling horrors from “Time…” through the lengthy “Everything Is Broken or Stolen;” then, the epic, wryly named “Dairy Queen” drags us from the icy dungeon into an Asiatic (!) sun, culminating one of this year’s most complex musical statements in one of recent memory’s most purely uplifting conclusions.

If I were a prick, a real piece of shit, I might call them “the Danish Deerhunter.” Aurally, this comparison may have merit (though Pinkunoizu also shows clear traces of Sin Fang Bous), but it does neither of these bands proper justice for what they are unto themselves. Pinkunoizu, amongst these peers, can stand tall—there is all the eagerness, all the dramatic conceptualism associated with acts as adventurous as these, but there is enough of a hint of wide-eyed joy to truly let their aesthetic souls stand confidently alone.

Listen to “Time Is Like A Melody” by Pinkunoizu:

[audio:http://godonnybrook.com/v3/wp-content/themes/mimbo2.2/images/01-Time-Is-Like-A-Melody.mp3|artists=Pinkunoizu|titles=Time Is Like A Melody]