Track of the Moment

Land ahoy

February 7, 2011 0 Comments

If you went about organizing your music collection in such a way, you’d probably put Oh Land in the same camp as Björk, Lykke Li, Feist, and other female artists whose work has a certain idiosyncratic quirk to it. But if these creative ladies were to find themselves quite literally sharing a filing cabinet, they’d most certainly break out of it, with each banging out completely different sounds from the metal discards of their former confines.

Oh Land, aka Denmark’s Nanna Øland Fabricius, is the daughter of an opera singer, but only came to music after a back injury at 18 cut short her ballerina dreams. All the better, if you ask me, because if Black Swan has taught us anything, it’s that, well, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Black Swan.

Signed to a Danish record label for whom she released an EP and an album, Fauna, in 2009 Oh Land set off on a self-financed U.S. tour. Her appearance at South By Southwest got Oh Land signed to Epic Records, and she relocated to Brooklyn. A self-titled EP appeared this past autumn, with a full-length (also self-titled) scheduled for March 15. She’s been getting raves for her live performances, in which fashion and video projections (on balloons!) are as much a part of the show as the music.

“I strive to make the possibilities endless and to have all the senses collide in to a language on their own,” Oh Land says. That sounds a heck of a lot like a certain Icelandic songbird, no? Comparisons don’t end upon hearing “Sun Of A Gun,” a snappy little tune that could very well be Björk’s, if music’s White Swan was ever this straightforwardly pop.

Purchase Oh Land – “Sun Of A Gun” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.