The Foreign Resort aren’t likely to be a featured hotel destination on Expedia any time soon, but if you’re into the heavily distorted and tortured howls of Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine, you may want to book a date with this Danish four-piece’s self-titled EP. They were also among the latest bands announced for South by Southwest in March, so you could always go see them in Austin. (Good luck finding accommodations for that week though.)
As for the five tracks that make up this EP, “Colleen” is a love cry about a broken heart “never healing quite like it used to/and never feeling quite like before.” It has a relentless, almost archetypical post-punk pace to it that you could probably pass off as a U2 song castoff from the very early 80s. “Orange Glow” is where things start to get murky. The opening sounds like a synthesized “Iron Man”, but then breaks out of its shell after about a minute. Electronica meets shoegazing head on in this song, with neither side emerging victorious, and everyone’s ears are bleeding a little by the end.
All throughout the EP, singer Mikkel Jakobsen’s voice is clear, crisp, and remarkably calm. He’s no Ian Curtis imitator, that’s for sure, even when the tempo shifts somewhat on “Heart Breaks Down”, which is slower to the point of being trancelike, and definitely eerie. There is also a much better balance than the previous song in terms of instruments competing against one another– putting up a “wall of sound” as it were. “Take a Walk” is about as cheery as these melancholic Danes get: it even has a good dance beat to it, but Jakobsen has to remind us that his band is moody and angry when he curses, “It was all too fucking good”.
Finally, the seven-minute-plus “Torch It” flickers out more than burn brightly, but just because it’s a tad meandering shouldn’t take away from the fact there’s some really good, loud stuff here that nu gaze fans of M83 and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart should enjoy.
Essential Tracks: “Colleen”, “Take a Walk”
