Marching Church

Copenhagen’s Marching Church, the onetime solo project and now bona fide big band formed by Elias Bender Rønnenfelt (best known as the lead singer of Iceage), will release sophomore album, Telling It Like It Is, on October 28th via Sacred Bones Records. Telling It Like It Is forgoes much of Marching Church’s past proclivity for wild stylistic swings in favor of thematically unified, complicated, but cohesive song arrangements. Immediately apparent through debut single, “Heart of Life,” which is being shared as a free download via Soundcloud today alongside the official video, the result is a more focused Marching Church, but one that hasn’t lost an ounce of swagger.

The band in 2016 is comprised of Rønnenfelt and frequent collaborator and Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith (electric viola, guitar), Lower’s rhythm section of Kristian Emdal (bass) and Anton Rothstein (drums), Jakob Emil Lamdahl (trumpet) and Hand of Dust’s Bo Høyer Hansen (guitar). Augmenting these sessions are Maaike Van der Linde (flute) and Thora Sveinsdottir (strings) of the Stargaze Orchestra, and the Choir of Young Believers’ Sonja La Bianca (saxophone), all coordinated with overall production by Escho’s Nis Bysted.

“We have here one world united under the sparks of one enormous disco ball hanging over us like the moon. In one fleeting moment in the light of its mirrored surface we see human endurance, in the next we see doom.” The light and shade Rønnenfelt finds in this worldview permeate the songs on Telling It Like It Is, an album that taps into a debauched lunacy that teeters on the verge of exhaustion and a charged sensuality. That never-ending push-pull is eloquently stated in “Heart of Life,” where Rønnenfelt sings, “my delusions vaguely resemble paradise.”