Elias Rønnenfelt - Heavy Glory Review
On his debut solo album, Elias Rønnenfelt swaps Iceage’s boisterousness for something much more intimate.
The idea of dropping everything and hitting an open road must have crossed everyone’s mind at one point or another during the Covid-19 pandemic, so fair play to Elias Rønnenfelt. In 2022 when the world was reopening, he grabbed an acoustic guitar, a notebook, and let his movements be dictated by an open invitation to play anywhere people wanted him to, offering up his services via an Instagram post.
It is the kind of behaviour you might expect from the troubadour singer of Danish punk band Iceage, who Rønnenfelt has fronted for the best part of two decades. Iceage themselves rarely stand still, their music evolving out of the blistering, sharp as glass punk of their earlier records to a mid-career swashbuckling sound, before on their most recent record, 2021’s Seek Shelter, a style more akin to the likes of Oasis and Primal Scream as well as the pantheon of 90s British guitar bands.
For those wondering what a Rønnenfelt solo record would sound like, Seek Shelter is a useful reference point, but not one that tells the whole story. There are shades of The Stone Roses’s Second Coming on ‘Another Round’ whose woozy harmonicas belong in the Wild West rather than Luton airport where Rønnenfelt narrates from. Bobby Gillespie’s influence is the constant that crops up throughout the album, most obviously via the dirty, grungy guitars on ‘Doomsday Childsplay’ and the country thump on ‘Like Lovers Do’.
But freed from his band’s squall and the expectation that comes with fronting a punk band, Rønnenfelt provides his most intimate and aching work to date. There is the weary, finger-picked Leonard Cohen homage ‘Soldier Song’, and the piano ballad ‘Stalker’ which tells the story of a young man whose love for a married woman finds him striking her violent husband to death. The sparse, cracked ‘Rivers of Madeleine’ finds Rønnenfelt broken but just about holding on.
Heavy Glory is also a record about letting go; a lost love haunts the records and bears itself on ‘No-one Else’ - a desperate account of a love broken like a vase, syllables spilling from Rønnenfelt’s mouth like a criminal in confession over a bass line ripped from Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. It is the rawest and the best song on the record, one that suggests that Rønnenfelt had good reason to leave when he packed up his books and guitar.