Track By Track: Danish duo Cancer on new album Totem

24 January 2017, 09:30

(When Saints Go Machine) (Cancer) (Chorus Grant)

Danish duo Cancer are readying their debut full-length record this week, and you can hear it here before Friday's release.

Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild (When Saints Go Machine) and Kristian Finne Kristensen (Chorus Grant) have been extremely quiet since they released the Ragazzi EP a couple of years ago.

But having released "Die One More Time" and "Esca", the stark live feel of the EP has been rounded out with some loose-limbed rhythms and doubling-down on trademark Cancer intensity. Totem is a magnificent record and well-worth the wait.

Below, you can stream the album in full alongside a track by track guide courtesy of Vonsild and Kristensen.

Esca

The song opens with the sound of a rotten cavalry approaching in the distance.

"Say you'll love me again! - Say you'll love me again! "- This repetition gave the song a core to orbit around. The outro is an example of how open-ended the song arrangements were when we recorded. As we go on tape we stand sweat dripping in a circle awaiting the drummers decision and intuition on how to end the song. As tape rolled he remained in torque and parked the song blindfolded.

Die One More Time

This song has held a special meaning to us from its conception. The melody was composed on guitar during a stay in Detroit and was sent across the Atlantic to Denmark. The sketch was received, understood and built upon. It deals with the grief loss leaves in its wake and the emotional loneliness that occurs from not being able to communicate ones "inner most feelings" with ones surroundings. The physical experiences in the broken city mirrored the human condition experienced in Copenhagen.

Honey

We thought of this as "a little song" that arose unexpectedly bouncing around ideas on a couch in the studio. We recorded it standing face-to-face around one microphone in the studio’s mix room. The finished track ended up being a collage of sounds from different contexts and to us sounds like a kind of nursery rhyme. The vocals in the first verse are recorded through the computer's built-in microphone lying on the bed.

Testa Nera Prima

Testa Nera Prima is Italian and means something along the lines of "the first female black/dark/bleak head". In context of our music the sentence originates from the same well of words as "Ragazzi" which was the title of our mini album released in 2014.

We have, as songwriters in this constellation, shared and dealt with many personal emotions in our music and lyrics, and as we both struggle with days where our heads feel clouded we sort of needed a way to put when one of us was having that “type of day”.

One of the ways we use to express this could be by saying: "I'm black in the head today."

Errors

This is probably the most "classic" or linear song appearing on the album. The melody has been lurking around in the back of our minds since the first get-away to the family cabin in northern Zealand to write songs. It has hints of the past, the present and the future.

Tears

Tears started as an impromptu jam we recorded and cut into pieces. The song was far from finished when we recorded it as a band but the basic form and lyric was written in simple and heartfelt affection. Tears is the track that has been “ through the most" editing-wise and we are proud of how it turned out. Sometimes you experience that the feelings you convey in a song have changed before it comes out and that you would have worded it differently had you felt then the way you feel now.

Mr Exorcist

There was a black grand piano in the studio main room, and we managed to convince our technician Michael Fischerson to play it and accompany this song. The album was recorded in Real Farm located on the island of Møn and there was something dramatic about the week we spent there. A winter storm raged with non-stop ice-cold rain. A windmill on top of the roof powered the studio with a generator. It was spinning so fast that sometimes we wondered whether it would end up ripping the roof off our heads. On the ride down a goose flew into the windscreen of our van and crushed it. The whole thing seemed as if nature needed to exorcise its demons too.

Tak For Nu

People stowed away. Put in boxes - stored. Constant signals sent from heaven to a world of receptors and appliances. Each individual must play their part, not only in relation to others but also in relation to the man-made machine hungry for power. Here – trees are replaced by power lines- and streetlights. Satellite communities consisting of fifteen stories of grey with no natural shade to seek cover in. A melody travels from section to section - "Your love is a wheel. Your love probes".

Savage

The backbone of Savage is a bass line played through a harmonizer pedal. This song was largely a computer-creation and therefore our approach to recording it as a band was to leave the original version playing in the background and record full band on top

Encouraged to flow over the edges of the starting point this jam ran from 2 to 3 in the morning and the final version of the song is a recording taken within that time.

"Head a code red bed unmade still save me."

Animals

Guitar trickles down the walls of a hotel room in Rio overlooking two residential high-rises. Staring out eyes slowly start to focus on a single window and seem to detect the outline of a mirror on the wall inside the apartment in the distance. A woman is in the apartment- she examines her reflection- a mirror image where the observer from across the yard appears. This joint reflection is an image of the "now" and everything outside of the mirror-frame a sort of future that has not yet come to pass. Sometimes it feels as if the subconscious knows what's in the pipeline for the real world.