On the Radar: Kings of Convenience

Friday, February 11

Paradise Rock Club

Kings of Convenience

9pm, $12

The Kings of Convenience cross the Atlantic for a short one-month jaunt in the northeast states, leaving their native Norway, where their last album, 2003’s Riot on an Empty Street sold more than 400,000 European copies. The tour is discussed in an in-depth article on www.norway.org, “Norway: the official site in the United States.” The single “Misread” overtook European MTV last summer, with its low-key unplugged melancholy and crisp, autumnal video of the band relaxing and playing music in a park, and the album was filled with a similar mellow, familiar sound—the scuffling of fingers along guitar strings, richness of cello and violin, and gentle vocals. While the Paradise Rock Club, the band’s second stop on this tour, is relatively intimate, the band will have to be capable of a lot more sound than they seem to prefer on the album. The band’s sound is so inviting, it’s as if you’re sitting in a carpeted room with the band splayed around you, maybe with a window view of a mid-sized European city—not quite the crammed floor and dark-lit ambience of the Paradise. The Kings hit the scene in 2000 with a self-titled album on Kindercore, but it wasn’t until 2001’s Quiet is the New Loud on Astralwerks that the band entered the critical limelight. That album title was a succinct statement of the band’s philosophy, but Riot on an Empty Street is no closer to riotous than the debut. The band’s two members, Erland Øye and Erik Glambek Bøe, have yet to stray formula that the first album’s name denoted, as opposed to the solo work of Øye, which ventures into laptop production and indie electronica. The balance of band members will surely be on show in concert: while Øye spends time touring his solo albums and DJing around the world, Bøe has been in Norway finishing a psychology degree, and the vocal interplay between the two is often the best part of a Kings album, as on the new album’s standout “Stay Out of Trouble,” where the band’s less-epic Simon and Garfunkel is paraded along with tweedy violins and plucked guitars. The meeting of voice is seamless, as is the meeting of minds: Kings of Convenience combine two talents and form an organic whole that will surely charm in concert all who are able to hear.