Ida Maria proves that Norwegians do it better
By Sheba White
Published: July 30th, 2008 | 1:15pm
I can smell Norwegian pop-punk sensation Ida Maria from here. She smells like something combustible, itchy, and fragile, like the last lingering tendrils from spent fireworks. It doesn’t matter that Maria is somewhere in England, stuffed into a tour van with her three-piece Swedish backing band (cheekily named the Strap Ons and featuring guitarist Stefan Törnby, drummer Olle Lundin, and bassist Johannes Lindberg), and I’m in the United States patiently trying not to let on that I’m talking to the most promising import to hit American shores in a long time. I can still smell the sharp, flinty whiff of success she gives off from across the ocean. The occurrence seems to be a common sensory phenomenon among the English music literati, as the 23-year-old has been creating a whirlwind of publicity across the pond with her explosive performances and innocuously titled new album Fortress Round My Heart.
Released in Norway in May 2008 and Europe-wide July 28, 2008, Ida Maria’s debut has been much-anticipated for over a year with teaser YouTube videos and repeated MySpace track plays of its singles. Maria’s label, however, has yet to set an American release date, further taunting American fans who were already upset by the band’s pass — for personal reasons — at 2008’s SXSW.
Expressing frustration over the release wait to the oddly cheerful self-described nihilist only results in Marley-isms appropriate for a woman who is incongruously known for impulsive reactions, like biting the bottom of a singer she didn’t quite fancy, and simultaneously focused enough on music’s appreciation to co-run her own record label, Nesna, with long-time boyfriend and fellow musician Sebastian Fors. “Waiting for something good is not waiting in vain,” Maria giggles in response over the fuzz-heavy phone line.
The deserved media hype has dubbed Maria (proper name Ida Maria Sivertsen) as a “breath of fresh air” in the Scandinavian music realm. Her aggressive pop-punk songs with their plaintively raw vocals and idiosyncratic lyrics (hit single “Stella,” for instance, has as its subject God’s more Zeus-like characteristics on display) are drawing comparisons too gushingly purplish to believe: “the female Iggy Pop,” “Bjork fronting Blondie,” and “Janis Joplin meets the Jam,” to name a few.
It’s true that Maria is nothing like the delicate pixies one has come to expect from Scandinavia, particularly when it comes to her performances. Her shows are noteworthy for their trails of broken bones, blood, and sweat, but Maria is quick to downplay her role in the oft-repeated lore that has ensued, eerily shifting from whimsical to earnest in her tone. “I love to play,” she says quietly. “We all do in this band. That’s really what we live for. It’s the best job in the world, I can’t say anything else than that.”
The most refreshing aspect of Maria is that she doesn’t seem to buy into the mythic-reserved nature attributed to Scandinavia’s citizens, noting in previous interviews that one of her idols, Morrissey, was an aftershave stinkbomb when introduced, and responding to the overused Bjork-meets-Iggy Pop reference with equally uncensored aplomb: “Bjork, she dabbles in electronica,” a somewhat pricked Maria sighs. “And Iggy is an old man. It’s really hard to relate to that. I’m just trying to be me the most I can.”
Likewise, any attempts to pigeonhole her three-minute pop-punk gems as Pogues-like poetry meet with similarly unvarnished self-critical responses. “I don’t really see myself as a poet,” Maria responds. “I just want to write simple lyrics. I want to write as honest and distinctive as possible. Maybe when I grow older, when I feel more secure on the English — it’s not my mother tongue — but I don’t want to go too experimental.”
Her personal history, Maria would have fans believe, reads just as straightforwardly: Born in Nesna, Norway, and introduced to music through her church vocalist mom, jazz/ska guitarist dad, and family doctor (who had an impressive American rock record collection), Maria’s background is sewn with the typical rocknroll fan threads. The first song she learned to play was Lennon’s “Imagine,” but she didn’t really take songwriting seriously until her teens when she wrote her first number over a broken romance (“It was titled ‘Just Great,’” she sheepishly admits). Her first concert, she says, was Bob Dylan. Her favorite performers are Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles. And when she’s not performing, she claims to live a fairly staid life: simultaneously working as a house painter, a fishing museum worker, and an odd-job runabout.
Yet the thematic complexity on her 30-minute release suggests darker moments scurrying about that bright suburban view. Digging deeper on “Stella,” for instance, exposes Ida Maria’s doubt of traditional rituals. “It actually came in with the Christmas tree,” Maria says of the song. “I just got annoyed by the whole Christmas-traditional thing. I just wanted to discuss what we really care about.” When pushed to expand, she simply says, “Pop songs are built up by formula, and it’s fun to play around with that formula. It turned out to be a bit more pop-punk than I expected. I think we were all surprised that we turned it a little punk.”
The suggestion is that fans would do best to find their own descriptions for the young singer-songwriter musician. In that regard, perhaps Ida Maria can best be described not as a breath of fresh air, but as the explosive energy that makes the old air exciting again. Fans would do best to put on Fortress Round My Heart and deeply breathe it all in.
Ida Maria MySpace
Ida Maria Web site
Issue #33
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more