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biography / portrait

For anybody with an interest in the Ricochets and/or Madrugada, it is obviously a terrific pleasure to learn that the guitarists from the two bands are putting their heads together. The pleasure persists even though the monster, called My Midnight Creeps, actually does not especially resemble either of the aforementioned bands. The debut album from My Midnight Creeps is without exaggeration one of the most remarkable debuts in Norway in many years. Not only is the band bursting with a surplus of energy, recklessness, and authority, they are furthermore armed with such monumental and appropriate quantities of self-confidence and cheeky attitude that you would think they had been playing for years and already achieved mastery of the universe. It is no news that Alex Kloster-Jensen and Robert Burås are two absurdly great guitarists, nor is it a secret that they can write melodies that other bands would be willing to grind off vital limbs with coarse sandpaper in order to call their own. In MMC they have nevertheless achieved the artistic coup of outdoing themselves, and in a sphere of music they have not previously occupied, at that. This is shockingly good rocknroll from dark back alleys that not even Satan himself with body armor and automatic weaponry would dare to tread in. Here we find traces of the ramshackle soul music we know from the Detroit Cobras and Dirtbombs, with elements of the Cramps wildness and horniness, the Sonics' crazy garage mania along with hypnotic and suggestive moments we associate with heroes like the 13th Floor Elevators and Spacemen 3; we are tittilated by fragments of coal-black blues from the most combative stretches of the Mississippi, and last but decidedly not least we are supplied with ample quantities of the exorbitant, dark, apocalyptic and wild chaos from the legendary, inevitable the Stooges; especially as represented by that bands 1970 classic Fun House. In addition to all this, My Midnight Creeps has managed to forge an album that at no time becomes grating or harsh. This is partly achieved by the inclusion in the mixture of a couple of tender, heartstring-tugging, goosebumps-all-over ballads. The song Untrue is in this sense one of the most beautiful, but at the same time most intense beneath-the-skin experiences I have had in a long time. My Midnight Creeps has far too many great qualities to be treated like some halfhearted stepchild side-project. Its quite simply too astonishingly hair-raisingly good. If this band doesnt make it in Norway or in the great Yonder out there, its just the final decisive evidence that the world has gone to pot and that humanity is bound for Hell. I prefer to be optimistic about people. And good Lord, I dig My Midnight Creeps. In the name of rock, Egon Holstad Rock'n'roll-dealer. Tromsø Kill City. (source: www.myspace.com/mymidnightcreeps)