Harrys Gym

How good are Harrys Gym? Teen orgasm-inducingly good. “Not to step over any boundaries,” declared Marlene, a 15-year-old fan of the Norwegian four-piece, on her blog, “but they literally give you an orgasmic feeling all over your body.” She was perhaps responding to the soaring, luminescent vocals whose sex it is so hard to fix, the deft mingling of traditional instruments and electronics, the eerily captivating melodies, or the near erotic sense of yearning that pervades their music. Perhaps it’s the way noise and pop rub each other up the right way in their songs. Still, it’s not a bad response considering, after all, that this is a band – ragged exponents of out-of-this-world music - named after something as mundane and worldly as the abandoned fitness centre that they found in the same building as their rehearsal space. It might also explain the missing possessive apostrophe in their moniker – maybe they got as carried away by their playing as young Marlene, and lost all knowledge of grammar. How to describe their sound? How to categorise it for the purposes of the marketplace and the wider audience that is surely theirs for the taking? It is lush and lovely enough to call it “dreampop”, but intricate and intense enough to merit the term “prog-pop”. It rocks hard but is simultaneously lighter than air and relies as much on guitar-bass-drums as it does keyboards – grungetronica? Synth-gaze? “No one knows how to describe us,” says Anne Lise, “or what category to put us in. We’re a pop band but we’re not the easiest – there are more radio-friendly bands than us. And we can be pretty hard-hitting live, which no one expects.” Anne Lise explains that “the one band we all agree on is Blonde Redhead - although we don’t have their Sonic Youth approach to music. We’re more poppy.” She admits that Harrys Gym “never dreamed of being a noise band”, especially in Norway where “everyone plays heavy guitar rock and wants to be in a garage band, making a lot of noise”. So they set about achieving the perfect blend of dissonance and dreaminess. “There are a lot of synths but it’s still pretty noisy,” she says. “But the most dominating thing is the melodies.” Those melodies are artfully anguished, and suffused with a sense of sorrow and sadness. Is this part of the Norwegian condition? “There is a lot of darkness here, and cold weather in winter – people get depressed because they don’t see sunlight for ages,” she explains. “It’s easiest for people from the UK to talk about a Nordic melancholia. I never used to be able to recognise it but I can see it now. There is more sadness, less party, in our music. We tend to make stuff that is a little bit claustrophobic and dark, which describes the winter months of Oslo very well. I never understand what I’m doing living in Norway from November until March! But there is a positivity hidden in there as well. Not even very well hidden. The typical Norwegian is introvert and awkward, until you get to know him.” According to Anne Lise, Harrys Gym are moving towards the perfect synthesis of pop and, well, synths – she once said that she had been “trying for 10 years to re-write XTC’s Making Plans For Nigel”. “We’re using more electronic textures – that’s the way we’re going,” she asserts. “We want to combine the electronic and the organic.” The band have been most impressed recently by the collaboration between folk singer Vashti Bunyan and doyens of the US underground turned alternative mainstream idols Animal Collective. “We don’t want to sound like them but that way of combining the electronic and organic is what we’re aiming for.” The closest that Harrys Gym have come to achieving that on their self-titled debut album is on album opener Brother, Sarah83, Attic, Top Of The Hill and Turn Away. “Those,” she says, “are the key tracks.” What makes those tracks even more special is her voice, like a cross between a choirboy and Bjork. “It’s a great compliment to not be attached to any sex – to be androgynous,” she admits, adding that her vocals are “less floaty and dreamy than disturbed.” Is she disturbed? “We all are, I guess, if we go into this business with open eyes in 2010.” She reveals that she “never listened to female singers” growing up, and that her favourite vocalists are mainly male, particularly the late, great Billy Mackenzie, whose near-operatic leaps between octaves graced the music of early-‘80s Scottish duo Associates. “I don’t necessarily sound like him,” says Anne Lise, “and to some people he sounds freaky, but to me it sounds like the best voice in the world.” The songs she writes for Harrys Gym are, she says, “about family issues and close relationships and how sometimes they can be dysfunctional. That shows up a lot in our lyrics.” She always sings in English – “I grew up listening to English lyrics and hardly listen to anything sung in Norwegian. When I first started writing songs at 12 that was the musical language I knew.” Harrys Gym are already plotting their next move, working in Norway with feted UK remixer/producer James Rutledge on a follow-up album and planning some live shows. Oh, and preparing to avoid being plunged into narrow pigeonholes. “I’m told we don’t really sound like anyone else. Or, that is, we tend to sound just like the listener’s favourite artist even if it is a completely different artist with a completely different sound. In other words, we will make you feel like you do when you listen to your favourite music.” As though you’re overcome with orgasmic longing. Just ask Marlene. Paul Lester March 2010