Ungdomskulen

“UNGDOMSKULEN?” a Norwegian journalist said to us recently. “Man, that band practices hard”

He wasn’t exaggerating.

Ever Records were first introduced to the music of UNGDOMSKULEN, three puerile minded individuals from Bergen, West Norway,  - Kristian Stockhaus, Øyvind Solheim, Frode Kvinge Flatland – in early 2006. The three mp3s we received demanded they be played repeatedly, at ridiculously loud volume, until they shredded our speakers. We wrote to the band and arranged to fly in to see them play. “We could meet for dinner beforehand,” we said.

“Yes,” they replied, “and perhaps we could go to a movie afterwards.”

We asked for pictures of the band and they sent two, one in which they stood hooded against a monolithic slate rock face, snow falling around them, and another in which the three of them posed as happily deranged brothers for a family photograph.
We met in Bergen and they pointed out posters advertising their gig which featured a spectacularly vivid close up of a tongue. The band’s name was printed in green slime weirdly reminiscent of the Ghostbusters logo despite bearing little similarity. It was absurdly comic and grotesquely absurd at once.

They played a show that night that matched brutal ferocity with thunderous rhythms. Nearby brains visibly overloaded while trying to process the choice between abandonment to the beat or surrender to the noise. We ended the evening in the band’s dressing room chewing cucumbers erotically with Øyvind.

They turned up some months later opening for Datarock in a Berlin warehouse near the Ever Records HQ where they reduced a packed crowd who had never heard of them to a sweating pulp who would never again mispronounce their name.

All the while they held the idea of a record label at arm’s length. There was no rush. They had work to do.

That work was to practise. And to practise some more. And then, when the practising was complete, they’d talk about what they still needed to practise. All this whilst still maintaining the same perverse sense of humour that forces them to give songs titles like Gloryhole and Witches Mate in The Underground while calling their band UNGDOMSKULEN, a word designed to trip up the tongues of under achievers the world over. 

“Rokysopp was a weird name and that didn’t seem to hold them back,” they argue, and frankly they’ve got a point.

When they emerged they had sharpened their playing much as a knifesmith perfects the ultimate blade: utterly faultless razor-sharp metal glints in the sunlight. And of the three songs that originally brought them to Ever Records’ attention, only one has made the cut such is the relentless improvement in their writing.

When we first heard UNGDOMSKULEN we knew they belonged on Ever. The fact that they have taken over a year to negotiate a deal has had no detrimental effect on their suitability for the world at large. Their music is timeless because it is bigger than time. It’s monumental, epic, glorious and colossal. It’s disciplined, out of control, uncategorisable, definitive. We once called it “the sound of Steve Albini playing progrock disco”. That doesn’t even come close - we’ve also seen words like Black Sabbath, Can, Frank Zappa, The Melvins, The Jesus Lizard, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Public Image Ltd, The Fall and The Cure thrown around – but it’s the best we can do right now.The practise has paid off. This is the best shit you will hear all year.