Caught in the Carousel

Mammut

Mammut
Smekkleysa

Mammut

Wouldn’t it be cool to blast a band like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but dub their sappy lyrics over in Icelandic? Now you can. But for underage rockers, these teens have a mature sound that both Rolling Stone and my sixty-year old, Carpenters-obsessed mom have deemed worthy. Mammut boasts a freight train driving bass and piano line, punk guitar licks, and vocals that could challenge the lungs of Chrissie Hynde or Stevie Nicks. Their 2006 debut is the child of the Sugarcubes-founded Smekkleysa (Bad Taste) label, who also discovered the internationally revered Sigur Ros. The band has made the most of its genes: front woman Kata’s father collaborated with the pre-Sugarcubes Bjork while guitarist Arnar’s father is a classical virtuoso. Not surprisingly, Kata often takes Bjorkesque vocal risks, vacillating between a high-pitched wail and a sexy, lower-voiced insistence. Collectively, the band’s angst mirrors the potential energy fuming behind Iceland’s volcanoes, geysers, and shifting plates. But you wouldn’t guess these powerhouses are only eighteen-years-old. While their songs aren’t necessarily complicated, they’re tight. You want to dance, or run through Brooklyn’s alleys, or blare them during the peak of Saturday night. Plus, they’re lyrically smart: “Peir reyna” (“They Try’) for example, alludes to Pandora’s box and the Tower of Babel. Occasionally, the songwriting tends towards the formulaic—the fazer guitar effects lack self-awareness and on one track, a background sample of recorded laughter feels less than authentic. But by their second record, which they plan to write in English, I’m confident they’ll loosen up and expand into some Radiohead or Deerhoof inspired experimentation.

Mammut’s Kata Talks To Caught In The Carousel:

Caught In The Carousel: Your sound is explosive and catchy; it was a shock to learn that you are only teenagers! At what age did music attract you, and when did you pick up your first instruments? Do you ever find that bands or audiences don’t take you seriously until they hear you play?

Kata: Still people think we are a very young band though actually, we are now 18 to 19 years old. I don’t think we think about that much but maybe people don’t expect much from us if they know our age.

CITC: I’ve heard you compared to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Minutemen—so were you guys listening to punk and/or heavy metal in elementary and middle school? What bands influenced you then, and were some of them Icelandic?

K: Lots of music influenced us then and of course still does, but the thing is that we all listen to such different music that we can’t try to follow some one band. I even think that we have never talked about a band we would like to sound like. But we have all had our heavy metal and punk periods.

CITC: What is your primary reason for writing songs in your mother tongue and not English? Why have you chosen to do your next record in English?

K: It came naturally to start writing in Icelandic. We just started playing for fun so we didn’t see a reason for singing English for Icelandic people, and then also, we are from Iceland. The reason for writing English for our next album is that hopefully more people than just Icelandic will listen to our album. And if we are saying something important we want them to understand, though we will definitely hold on to some Icelandic lyrics.

CITC: Powerful bass and guitar riffs seem to propel your songs. Are the bassist and guitarist the primary songwriters for Mammut? Or, are the songs a product of a collective process? Tell us a bit about how the music comes about.

K: We all write the songs together and in every song someone owns a lot or a
little bit in it. One of us comes up with one bass/guitar/piano line and then we all try to write the song around it.

CITC: Mammut has a fun, screw it, shake-it-on-the-dance-floor flavor. Name some favorite Friday night records for us.

K: Haha...I think we have never heard that description about us, but it's great if people get that in our music. The new album with CSS is a favorite and then just some dorky fun music.

CITC: Can you translate four or five lyrical lines from one of your songs for our English speaking audiences? Can you also elaborate a bit about the emotional context that produced those lines?

K: "I sneak upon them, and I take the key, out pours primal screams." This song is called "They Try" and is the opening song to our last album. The lyric is about some middle aged men trying to lock up all their bad emotions in a tower they are building, but they fail when a little girl steals the key and lets all the angry and bad feelings out again.

—Alex Mattraw