The debut album by Todd Terje seems to have baffled as much as it has delighted in its first week in the world, with sceptics quick to pull a face at its unabashedly retro charms and taste for kitschy exotica.
As the album cover hints, herein is a place where pointed collars and signet rings live on, where palm fronds frame the view and cocaine dusts the piano lid, and where your drink always, always has an umbrella in it.
Anyone expecting 10 sharply honed cuts of shimmering nu-disco will instead discover an absurd melange of squelchy ’80s boogie, giddy Latin jazz, soft-focus porn synths and, on tracks like ‘Alfonso Muskedunder’ and ‘Preben Goes To Acapulco’, imaginary soundtracks for zany ’60s spy movies and Caribbean-set thrillers. It’s a distinctly nerdy approach, as Terje would happily admit (his own blog is even called Let’s Nerd), and one that sprouted naturally in the absence of a genre-focused dance scene in Norway.
Contrary to the exotic concoctions on the album’s sleeve, the only drink that’ll do for the clean-living Terje is a classic whiskey sour. So to celebrate the belated arrival of his excellent debut album, we’ve come up with a not-at-all awkward extended cocktail analogy to explore the five piquant – and occasionally unexpected – ingredients that combine to make It’s Album Time.
Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 1/6)
WHISKEY
The basis of a whiskey sour is, naturally, the booze – the base note to which all other ingredients are tuned, and the malty whiff that flicks the switch marked ‘danger’ deep in your brainbox. In Terje’s case, we’re talking disco – nu-disco, space disco, Eurodisco, cosmic disco and more bloody disco.
Even the world-beating ‘Inspector Norse’, which closes the album in a whorl of parping Arps and laser blasts, “sounds like normal, boring nu-disco” to Terje, apparently. But perhaps you would say that if you’d pretty much invented nu-disco in the studio you share with fellow kings of the niche, Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm.
For the past decade they’ve plundered the sleekest, fizziest, spangliest sounds of the late ’70s and early ’80s disco boom, whittling over-familiar tunes by the likes of Chris Rea and the Bee Gees into finely tuned dancefloor destroyers. Disco edits are how Terje made his name – in fact, until 2012’s It’s The Arps EP, he’d barely released any original material in his decade-long career.
Album tracks: ‘Inspector Norse’, ‘Delorean Dynamite’, ‘Strandbar’, ‘Oh Joy’
See also: Chris Rea, ‘On the Beach’ (Todd Terje Edit); Bee Gees ‘You Should Be Dancin’ (Todd Terje Edit); Lindstrøm and Todd Terje, ‘Lanzarote’
Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 2/6)
LEMON JUICE
A squeeze of lemon juice adds a tangy, cerebral note to your whiskey base, and for Terje that sharpness comes from an unexpected infusion of Latin jazz, most notably on the frantically hot-steppin’ ‘Alfonso Muskedunder’ and ‘Svensk Sås’.
The latter is in fact a giddily sped up cover of a 1978 scat-jazz number by Swedish singer and Eurovision entrant Monica Törnell, sounding oddly childlike and exotic all at once. “I love Latin percussion and especially the more danceable jazzy stuff from the ’60s and ’70s,” he told Fader regarding the cover. “It turned out a little bit different than I expected to be honest, but that’s what you get when you make something a couple of weeks before album mastering.”
Terje has also acknowledged a debt to Latin jazz and fusion guitarist Pat Metheny, saying he’d been working on other sketches for the album that sounded too Metheny-esque to even include.
Album tracks: ‘Alfonso Muskedunder’, ‘Svensk Sås’, ‘Preben Goes To Acapulco’
See also: Monica Törnell, ‘Svensk Sås’; Pat Metheny Group, Loading Video…
;list=PL1B219E1A7D532629″ target=”_blank”>Still Life Talking
Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 3/6)
SUGAR
Terje’s taste for overripe synth squelch and sickly sweet major chords has long helped him stand out among his more tastefully contrived peers, and there’s no shortage of saccharine moments on It’s Album Time.
An avowed gear nerd, Terje’s synth set-up leans heavily on his beloved Arp 2600 (the sound of ‘Inspector Norse’) and Arp Odyssey, which provides the record with most of its crunchy, serrated bass lines. Meanwhile, those steely, clean-cut drums heard throughout are courtesy of the Linn Drum, an ’80s classic that packs a punch on the disco tunes while lendinga misty-eyed, ‘Take My Breath Away’ mood to ‘Johnny And Mary’.
Veteran keyboardist Wally Badarou is one of Terje’s key influences in the synth stakes, whose work for Island Records (including in the Compass Point Studios house band along with Sly and Robbie) and solo instrumental material (see 1983’s Echoes) provide an important touchstone for Terje’s own expressive piano style. “I’m not only a fan of Wally Badarou, but also his time – how music sounded exactly at his time in the early to mid 1980s,” Terje told Juno, and the sun-kissed world of Island Records and collaborators like Grace Jones, Gregory Isaacs and Level 42 shines through on tracks like ‘Leisure Suit Preben’ and ‘Preben Goes To Acapulco’.
Album tracks: ‘Inspector Norse’, ‘Leisure Suit Preben’
See also: Wally Badarou, Loading Video…
;list=PL98DD94C4FE984323″ target=”_blank”>Echoes
Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 4/6)
ORANGE SLICE
A correctly executed cocktail should be easy on the eye as well as the gullet, and so we arrive at the garnish. Terje initially intended to base his album on vintage library music, the kind used to soundtrack TV and radio shows in the ’70s and ’80s. “It’s a lot about visually describing an event, often with a title like, ‘Wild Crazy Dramatic Couple at 140 BPM’ or ‘Calm Breezy Exotic Jungle Scene’,” he suggests. “I liked the visual aspect of it, making you imagine things as you listen to the music.”
Album centrepiece ‘Delorean Dynamite’ is Terje’s “acoustic image of a car racing through Miami with flashing street lights passing by”, and was inspired by ’80s studio wizard and ex-Rainbow keyboardist Tony Carey. His prolific output included dozens of solo LPs alongside music for films and TV, and his 1982 instrumental album Explorer is pretty much the blueprint for the shonky synthetic glamour that runs through It’s Album Time.
Album tracks: ‘Delorean Dynamite’
See also: Tony Carey, Explorer
Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 5/6)
MARASCHINO CHERRY
For an album so consistently sunshiney and exuberant, it’s a surprise to discover that the cherry on top – and perhaps the tipping point for anyone still on the fence – is its most downbeat moment, an indulgently moody interpretation of Robert Palmer’s jaunty 1980 hit ‘Johnny And Mary’, starring Bryan Ferry’s nicotine-coated croak and the one and only Linn Drum.
Terje and Ferry have met before, sonically speaking, with the Norwegian previously producing disco edits of Ferry’s ‘Don’t Stop The Dance’ and ‘Alphaville’ and a delirious take on Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is The Drug’. The singer had already been working on a Robert Palmer cover, but when his son Isaac brought Terje on board to remix 2011’s ‘Alphaville’, they starting hashing out a downtempo and doubly melancholic version of Palmer’s 1980 hit.
For added period detail, Ferry plays the Suzuki Omnichord, an autoharp-like synth invented in the early ’80s and quickly relegated to the status of kitschy memorabilia. The end result is pretty Marmite stuff, granted, but Terje’s starry-eyed innocence and Ferry’s haggard, wordly-wise delivery manage to steer ‘Johnny And Mary’ into a refreshingly irony-free zone.
Chin chin!
Album tracks: ‘Johnny And Mary’
See also: Robert Palmer, ‘Johnny And Mary’; Berlin, ‘Take My Breath Away’, Vangelis, Chariots of Fire theme
