I reckon the view from a laundry house on the North Sea coast somewhere between Stavanger and Bergen at this time of the year will be a cold one and that’s putting it mildly (pun intended).
Laundry House last paid us a visit in May of 2023 with ‘Edge to the sea’, a sublime piece of soft rock which builds over five and a half relentless minutes of eight verses, no choruses and a couple of half-bridges, out of a ballad into a banging anthem and which easily made its way into NMC’s Songs of the Year list.
They are a group of mainly Norwegians (other nationalities are available) who met at said community laundry house and started jamming together which turned into songwriting.
They are getting to be pretty well known in Norway – I see they recently performed at Rockefeller in Oslo and you don’t do a show there unless you cut the mustard – and I’m more than a little surprised that they aren’t better known over here. They will be.
‘Cold View’ is from their forthcoming album ‘Halcyon Time’, which drops on 31st May and from which, if I read their website correctly, there will be another single, ‘Enough’, released first.
The previous single was an ambient slow builder compared to ‘Cold View’, which rocks its way solidly through four minutes and by way of a harmonised vocal bridge and a guitar solo which is part-way between a second bridge and an outro except it isn’t the latter because it is overtaken by what sounds like an ice cream van’s call to action.
Lyrically, I’ll be honest, I haven’t a clue what it is about and I haven’t even got a starting point on that. It is full of obscure reference and idioms such as breaking a mirror (bad luck), smoke and mirrors (deception) and the devil at the wall (painting one is making a situation seem worse than it is).
After a while the only conclusion I could draw was that these are lyrics verging on the fanciful ones of symphonic metal and might not mean much at all. But I’m pretty sure I’m wrong on that.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s surprising what you can be moved to write while you are waiting for the spin cycle to finish.
Find them on:
Website: https://www.laundryhouse.no/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laundryhouseband
