razika: program 91

The teen girl camaraderie of Razika’s music is encapsulated neatly in their name, a codeword neologism used by the band to “describe a cute guy”. Though they officially formed in 2005, the four Norwegians – Marie Amdam (the group’s primary songwriter and vocalist), Maria Råkil, Marie Moe and Embla Karidotter Dahleng – have been childhood friends since the age of six, and it’s this closeness and youthful verve that primes their debut album, Program 91, with a refreshingly natural cohesion. Having spent their early years playing “straight punk”, driven by the underground rock records their parents played at home (the album title is a nod to 1980s Norwegian New Wave group Program 81), they later blended in the sounds they gravitated to as keen, hopped-up teenagers in Bergen: mainly Green Day, Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Later still, their music shifted again with an infusion of reggae influences, beginning to take on the ska-inflected bounce that runs throughout the album, recorded over the course of a year on the weekends that dotted their schooling.

While Razika have elicited some comparisons with The Slits and The Raincoats, Program 91 edges a little too close to the pop side of the fence for that to hold true, and it’s an association that the band themselves have found a little puzzling. Where The Slits had Ari Up’s Germaican feistiness, Razika are airy and sweet, drawing from the saccharine melodies and skirt-spinning rhythms of ’60s girl-group doo-wop and C86 twee. There’s a lush, doe-eyed quality to ‘Why We Have To Wait’, a cover of 1960s Norwegian pop group The Pussycats, and the skipping tempo of ‘Youth’, but the album’s real magic lies in its toe-tapping ska tropes. ‘Taste My Dream’ is frilled with infectious skanking rhythms and harmonies, while ‘Nytt På Nytt’ (‘new on new’) pays homage to The Specials, weaving in a borrowed riff from their 1981 hit ‘Gangsters’; it’s a rather singular formula – British ’70s ska refracted through a Norwegian girl-group pop prism – and it pays off joyfully.

Where tracks like ‘Above All’ and ‘Why We Have To Wait’ come laced with sugary pop hooks, the likes of ‘Middelalder’, ‘Taste My Dream’ and ‘Nytt På Nytt’ turn out some spirited punk-edged vocals, cute and rowdy in equal measures. Elsewhere, the beats on ‘Aldi’ and ‘Eg Vetsje’ lag behind the skank guitars by a fraction, giving the songs a shinky-shonky, ever-so-slightly DIY charm. It’s the kind of slipshod swagger that made 2Tone so thrilling, but Razika benefit from the added mystique of slipping effortlessly between English and Norwegian from song to song. Then, after ten songs of largely upbeat tempos, the album bows out with the surprisingly wistful, percussion-free ‘Walk In The Park’, full of wafting coos and chiming acoustic strings. It’s an unashamedly girlish effort that tops off an album that’s full of teen romance and innocent frivolity, but Razika deliver enough spry and focused energy to keep proceedings bubbling halfway between the clouds and the ground.

[Smalltown Supersound; August 15, 2011]

Written by: Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Tags: program 91, razika

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 2:51 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.