KAADA

Thank you for giving me your valuable time

CD / Ipecac

You have heard all this before. But never quite like this. Or something unlike this. Kaada defines a new step in what I like to call Scandinavian-Weirdo-Pop and what sounds like listening to several radiostations filled with Seventies-Soul and Minimal-Music at once. And the effect is, that you won’t be able to stop listening to this… whatever it is.

The nearest approximation for this indescribable piece of musical weirdness is that it sounds like the auditive analogy to the futuristic style of old movies from the Seventies. In mixing several songs together, songs that might be early Seventies-Soul, late Seventies electronic music, mid-Seventies-blues and maybe some more styles from the Seventies, Kaada spreads the atmosphere of a futuristic retro-style. Sounds unbelievable? Well it is. Can you really understand a song that starts with a loop of “Shake it up babalooba be lap bam boom”, modified in speed to get slower and slower, and then breaking off into a mixture between Sixties-Beat-Lounge and Seventies-James-Bond-Theme only to break into “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” at the next possible moment? And we are only talking about one little track on this CD (“Black California”) and there are nine more.

Whenever someone says to me “Scandinavian Weirdo-Music” I take a listen to it. I don’t care if it is electronica, noise or pop or whatever, these three words take me. I don’t know what it is? The midnight-sun? The freezing climate? Something in the water? But there seems to be an awful lot of strange music (and other strange things) going on in Scandinavia. Maybe it is only my perception, because as I said “Scandinavian Weirdo-Music” is the password to get by my gatekeepers (that is the way gatekeepers work) and thereby I filter all the weird noise around and only that from Scandinavia stays in my net. But this time around it is not only me, but also obviously Mike Patton, another weirdo in his very own right, who has fallen for this strange mêlée of hilarious music genius / mental instability.

For there is only a thin line between being a genius and being crazy, even though I am not quite sure, if I’d prefer genius to craziness or the other way round. Still, genius and nutcase are only a small definition apart from each other. I’ll name only one other artist in here, but only because he is walking the same thin line: Bobby Conn. If you like Bobby, then you’ll also like Kaada. I wonder what the “alike-search” at Amazon.com would give you. People who liked Kaada also liked… well, what could there be? I guess, other stuff from the label, or completely different stuff. What would compare to the whining and wailing of the singer(s?) on here, in contrast to the mixing-desk-wizardry and the weird look on electronic pop? The sci-fi-theme-rip-offs? The strange samples (“yes, you are a good man.”)? And a hundred things more. A dozen dozen names come to mind an not a single one fits.