GISKE emerged from the wreckage and glory of The Margarets, the guitar-pop outfit that gave Norway four Top 10 hits and a gold record in the 2000s before folding into quieter, folkier pursuits. “August Came” marks a homecoming of sorts: a return to the jangling twelve-string, the harmonica curling round the melody like smoke off a bonfire, even a harpsichord slipped in for texture. Rune Berg’s Rickenbacker, lost to a tour thief years ago and only recently replaced by an instrument he deems worthy, carries real weight here \u2014 not as gimmick but as the literal restoration of a sound he’d been mourning since the early Margarets days.<\/p>
What gives the song its peculiar charge is the accident at its centre. Alex Rinde’s vocal, recorded as a guide track for the rhythm section, somehow survived into the final mix unedited. Pop music is full of producers smoothing the seams; here the seam is the song. A guide-vocal-turned-final-take carries a fragility no amount of polish could fake, and one suspects the band knew it the moment they heard it back \u2014 the slight hesitations, the rawness, the sense of a man caught mid-thought rather than performing one.<\/p> Ronnie Mag Larsen describes the song as the feeling of summer finally arriving while already sensing autumn on its way, and that’s the emotional engine running underneath the jangle: pleasure shadowed by its own expiry date. Rinde, characteristically self-deprecating, claims not to know what the lyrics are really about, then offers an answer anyway \u2014 island childhood, not quite fitting in, the particular loneliness of growing up somewhere small and far from everywhere else. It’s a theme these three have presumably been circling since they wrote “Epitaph” on their bikes as teenagers, and decades haven’t dulled its pull; if anything, distance has sharpened it.<\/span><\/p> There’s something almost stubborn in a band of this vintage refusing to chase contemporary production trends, opting instead for three-part harmonies and a twelve-string that sounds plucked from 1989. Call it unfashionable; call it, more generously, a band who know exactly which version of themselves they’re trying to sound like, and have finally found the right guitar to do it.<\/span><\/p> “August Came” is the third single from *Ten Visits, Ten Songs*, an album built from Berg’s literal train journeys to Rinde’s home on Giske \u2014 one visit, one song, repeated until an album emerged. Whether the rest of the record matches this single’s particular alchemy of homesickness and harpsichord remains to be heard. But as a statement of intent from three men who never stopped writing together, it suggests October’s full-length will be worth the trip.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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