We’ve had a week at Nordic Music Review listening to excellent albums from Arstidir and Esko Järvelä Epic Male Band, but it does feel pretty good to change direction slightly and head back to some new offerings that are entirely based on guitar driven alternative rock.
‘The Back Pages’ are from Oslo and released their debut album in October 2013, and you can now get it for free if you visit their Bandcamp page at the bottom of this feature. Their style of music is refreshingly straight forward, high energy driving guitars, always upbeat and big catchy choruses.
Theyre in the midst of recording their new album, but there are 2 new songs that are now available to listen to. We’ve provided the links below (this website doesn’t allow us to embed Soundcloud into blog posts…. sigh), and theyre good down-to-earth rock songs.
The first is ‘When the Spirit Flies’, with a big guitar opening, and a sound which to me has echoes of bands like ‘The Flatliners’ from Canada, unpretentious solid, and bold. As always theres a lead up to a big chorus and it keeps going at a relentless pace.
The 2nd track is called ‘This Whole Mess’, its slightly less frenetic, with a slightly more reflective subtle section in the middle, which builds back up to a bigger ending. The song still has a good tune, and if you like real honest indie rock then we’d recommend you give them a listen:
Of equal interest to us, is that on Bandcamp there’s a little 4 song acoustic set they did at John Dee which you also can download for free. This is the type of thing we love to see and hear.
‘The Back Pages’ new album will hopefully with us sometime this year, and in the meantime if youre in Norway you can catch them in Trondheim on May 15th, check their Facebook page for details.
Website: www.thebackpages.no
Bandcamp: http://the-back-pages.bandcamp.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thebackpages
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thebackpages