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Wallpaper Silhouettes formed in 1999 by Mats Davidsen and Tony Jacobsen as an extention of an older Davidsen project. Later joined by Jo Henning Dahlø on drums and live keyboard and guitar player Jan Ottar Nystad, WS traveled up and down in Norway, performing for 1 to hundreds of people. A "nostalgic" gang of people favoured this band that fell outside of everything at the time and eventually disbanded in 2006. Two albums were released: Echo the World (we live in) and Hollow Earth. Both were praised in Norway and in England, one reviewer called the latter "the real thing" compared to The Killers and The Bravery. Nevertheless they both flopped as the world in general seemed defiant of this weird combo who would occasionally cancel gigs and aggravate their local music scene.
Please look to the links below for current projects of former WS members:
PAINTED ROMANS (Mats Davidsen)
WE ARE MONSTERS (Tony Jacobsen)
* * RELEASES * *
HOLLOW EARTH
CD limited to 1000 copies. Message for information on how to get it.
Released by Record Surgery Products October 2005.
* * * Review by SubbaCultcha.com * * *
On their second album, Wallpaper Silhouettes show the posers a thing or two, and deliver a beautiful slice of Scandinavian pop--
On first listen, I assumed that this must be an old re-issue, until I realised that Norway's Wallpaper Silhouettes have only been around since 1999. The sorrowful vocals, post-punk bass lines, and densely melancholic atmosphere of the album very much puts it very much in the category of New Romantic or New Wave bands of the mid-eighties. Sure, retro New Romantics are ten-a-penny nowadays (The Killers, The Bravery, you know the sort of thing), but whereas with most of them its plainly obvious that they're just mere posers aping something they saw on Top of the Pops 2, Norwegian Hollow Earth carries this off as if the past twenty years never happened.
Kicking off with a Steely Dan-esque piano intro, the first song, "Your Weary Eyes" kicks off with a bass like that PIL would have been proud to call their own, and perhaps in a nod to The Smiths, Mats Davidsen croons, "We've come together like hand in glove"- you're practically bombarded by the sheer eighties-ness of the record, and you're only a minute in. The rest of the album follows a similar course, with lots of murky, claustrophobic layers of reverb and feedback, plaintive piano arrangements, and gloomy lyrics decorate the album with a sweet sadness. It can at times be plodding, not least in "Urban Runner", which clocks in at a mammoth ten minutes, forty-one seconds. "Urban Runner"? Are they trying to be ironic? Probably.
I digress, Hollow Earth is certainly anything but hollow, and despite being undeniably derivative of bands like Duran Duran or Simple Minds, they are not mere posers or pretenders, indeed, they show most other eighties-revivalists how it should be done. Not one to stick on if you're down in the dumps, but nonetheless a beautiful slice of Scandinavian pop.
By Chris Bell
ECHO THE WORLD (we live in)
Limited to 100 copies!!
Released by Record Surgery/Freedom Road Records
Get it at: Freedom Road Records
* * * Review by WhisperinAndHollerin.com * * *
This is a welcome oddity. The quartet WALLPAPER SILHOUETTES hail from Trondheim, Norway and have been doing their thing since 1999.
Strange as it may seem their thing is to proudly and skilfully resurrect the soul/funk/punk sound of Postcard Records, the kitchen sink glamour of The Associates and the urbane epic flourishes of The Chameleons. It’s a delightful and engaging cocktail that succeeds in reaffirming my enthusiasm for this music of 20+ years ago by actually creating an album that could be a long lost gem resurrected by the archivists at LTM Publishing.
It’s also a fairly ramshackle affair and self-evidently a first stab at pulling together their love for the music of this period into an album. Luckily the lack of coherency only increases the charm of ‘Echo The World (We Live In)’ and if anything serves to reinforce the DIY ethic that Postcard propounded all those years ago. This is as much a celebration of making music on your own terms as it is of the influences that have informed it.
The vocals are predominantly a cross between Edwyn Collins and Ian Curtis, their (obviously) mournful and dour undercurrent enhanced by the Scandinavian inflection. Key moments include the Orange Juice inspired About You, the guitar ambience of ‘Bells’ (very Chameleons) and the Joy Division coated ‘Silence Within Me’. Special mention though goes to the “if Kraftwerk played guitars” joy of ‘Not Supporting Walls’ and the atmospheric melody of the instrumental title track.
Great music is always about possibilities and new directions and with ‘Echo The World (We Live In)’ WALLPAPER SILHOUETTES have recaptured that musical spirit from the early 80s. Fortunately they’ve done it in such a way that demonstrates that history and changes in taste have failed to bring anything remotely approaching closure to that spirit and inventiveness. Once again so much of today’s music seems sterile and unimaginative by comparison.
7 out of 10 stars
By Different Drum
ECHO THE WORLD (we live in)
Limited to 100 copies!! (300 cassettes)
Released by Record Surgery/Freedom Road Records
Get it at: Freedom Road Records
* * * Review by Subba-Cultcha.com * * *
Combining staccato guitar strum with on-the-beat, mechanical sounding drum rhythms, Norwegian quartet Wallpaper Silhouettes return you to a time of CND marches, post-punk synth experiments, and red triangles indicating the naughty bits on Channel Four...
If you were an arts student in the early eighties, you're going to love this one. Combining staccato guitar strum with on-the-beat, mechanical sounding drum rhythms, Norwegian quartet Wallpaper Silhouettes return you to a time of CND marches, post-punk synth experiments, and red triangles indicating the naughty bits on Channel Four. All you need is a miners? strike and the setting would be perfect.
Perhaps this is to be expected given the band's stated aim of not so much creating music as an 'atmosphere'. Whether it's a result of the notorious Norwegian tendency towards depression or a studied tribute to the age of Postcard Records and The Associates, 'Echo The World (We Live In)' has something of the feel of a bleakly earnest filmscore to it, containing as it does not one but two instrumental tracks, which has led some reviewers to draw comparison with Teutonic knob-twiddlers Kraftwerk (only with guitars and a phaser pedal).
Indeed, the most common adjective used for this, the band's debut (originally released as a nine-track cassette), is 'ramshackle'. Although the album can be something less than the sum of its parts, it's clear that Wallpaper Silhouettes are fully aware of the direction they're taking: they're headed straight for the territory once held by Simple Minds, in the days of a New Gold Dream - before 'Jim' Kerr became better known as 'Wang'.
Tracks such as 'About You' and 'You Don't Need To Get Me What I Want' may well bring back memories of Associates-style torch, without having quite the range that Billy MacKenzie once paraded; however it's when they hit album highlights such as 'The Gift' or 'Silence Within Me' that the band's disparate elements unite into a truly cohesive whole.
It's hard to tell whether pretentiousness abounds in lyrics such as: 'The silence of anger in me not for you to adore my love/ My body is young and I say you should quit winding me up' (the Phil Oakey-inspired 'Autumn Love') or if this is simply the result of singing in your second language, but in the end it doesn't really matter. It's the sense of a time before Goth that Wallpaper Silhouettes have succeeded in recreating. So much so, I'm getting me a beret and a snood before listening again. Altogether now: 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. . .'
by Doug Devaney
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