Katzenjammer are an entertaining curiosity. Four young Norwegian women who met at music school, they are all impressive singers and multi-instrumentalists who write songs in English. They mix good-time pop and Americana, but throw in influences that include Celtic and Balkan styles. Most importantly, they have an enormous sense of fun.
They’ve played arenas and festivals, but tonight they are in the upstairs room of a London pub to preview songs from their new album, Rockland, which is dominated by an acoustic fusion of country and blues. Sweden’s First Aid Kit and our own Ward Thomas have shown that there is a place for non-American female pop-country bands, and on this showing Katzenjammer fit easily into that market.
They opened with Curvaceous Needs, a cheerful and stomping country-rocker on which they showed off their four-part harmonies and played acoustic guitar, banjo, drums and an enormous bass balalaika. Then they moved on to a slinky new blues, and began to switch instruments, as bass guitar replaced balalaika and the banjo player moved to keyboards. And so it continued. All four provided lead vocals while constantly swapping instruments, which soon included accordion, mandolin and glockenspiel. The new songs were mostly upbeat and ranged from the gutsy Bad Girl, backed by slide guitar, to the poignant and thoughtful Lady Grey, written by Marianne Sveen, about an Alzheimer’s patient she met while working as a nurse.
Mixed in with this new and commercial set of tunes were reminders of the wild variety of the band’s earlier work, which included the furious, Gypsy-influenced workout A Bar in Amsterdam, in which Solveig Heilo played trumpet, to a bizarre and dramatic horror ballad Hey Ho on the Devil’s Back, featuring howled vocal effects from Sveen. I hope that success doesn’t make them too sensible.
