After first unveiling themselves to the world with a wealth of bright and technicolour offerings earlier this year including ‘Bones’ and ‘This Town’, Scandinavian collective Twenty Committee, led by producer Anders Källmark, now return with their latest sweeping offering ‘In A Rush’ featuring vocals from Chloe Rodgers.
As a project that relies on a regular rotation of guest artists, singer Chloe Rodgers has been a regular feature in Twenty Committee’s catalogue to date. And it is no wonder why as her bright yet soaring vocals give their latest single a seriously warm and atmospheric direction. Moving away from the more pop-focused sound in their infancy, ‘In A Rush’ sees the group channel a wonderfully dark and heartfelt emotion throughout, lending more focus to their brooding demeanour.
Speaking about the new release, producer Anders Källmark said, “Out of all the songs (hundreds!) that has come out of the committee meetings, ‘In A Rush’ is always going to be the committee’s favourite”
While Chloe added, “‘In A Rush’ is about a one-sided relationship I was in where I gave so much and got nothing but cruelty in return, and eventually had to end it when I realised it would never get better”
They may or may not have taken their name from a counter-espionage operation, or that’s what they would like you to think anyway. Twenty Committee is the brainchild of Anders Källmark, an acclaimed music producer, composer and engineer, who has always had a direct and deliberate approach to the sound he is looking to create. Born in Sweden and a long-term resident of Stockholm now residing in London, Källmark came to the UK to study before quitting to pursue a career at Sony Classics, where he worked with composer Richard Horowitz, and has also been the mastermind behind the new EP ‘Whale’ from rising Swedish songstress Rebecka Reinhard.
As the power behind renowned record label Crowds and Power, an imprint named after an Elias Canetti book, published in 1960, that focuses on the dynamics of crowds and packs and asks why crowds obey the power of rulers, his label looks to take an equally rebellious route as it navigates the music turmoil to uncover truly hidden gems snuck into the fabric of our lives.
Correspondingly, as part of Crowds and Power’s diktat, Källmark has recruited a collection of Swedish and British songwriters and vocalists who make Twenty Committee’s debut album ‘Minutes’ something of an esoteric masterpiece. Amongst its rotating cast of characters lies Chloe Rodgers, a 23-year-old singer whose voice is so fiercely independent that she is in danger of becoming the Liz Fraser of the enterprise, and an artist that Källmark discovered whilst trawling through YouTube.
Originally from Nottingham, Rodgers’s vocal delivery is so obviously unaffected – and so delicately nuanced – you could be forgiven for thinking she could be of Scandinavian origin, or even Bjork’s younger sibling. This is particularly apparent on ‘Bones’, one of the more extraordinary songs that make up ‘Minutes’. ‘Bones’ is about jealousy and kicks off like Brian Eno’s Airports before morphing effortlessly into the kind of dewy-eyed synth pop (featuring some lovely Cure-type guitar) you’ve all been waiting for. It’s revelatory, of course, although no more so than ‘This Town’, a song that features looped techno-violin string arrangements, a perfectly positioned vocal you could put your arms around, and a story line centred on our intrepid hero venturing into the big city for the first time.
Elsewhere, the bitterly-prescient ‘In A Rush’ is a post-punk Banshees/Bjork/Modern Eon-esque delight, spotlighting a murderously bad relationship – it’s Källmark’s favourite song of the collection – that includes a murderously-sampled loop of one note of a cello recorded on a tomato farm in South Africa, whilst ‘Something New’ is a deceptively-sweet, piano-led ballad featuring a protagonist with a pathological need to move on even as they appear to be happy as part of a relationship. Best of all, is ‘Sick Of It All’, a song that started on an MS20 upright piano – originally used by Ultravox back in their heyday – at RAK Studios, before being managed and massacred as part of a sequential circuit that utilizes a Studio 440 drum machine. It’s part of a Lost Future netherworld last explored by those performing at the 1980 Leeds Futurama Rock Festival, a sound writ larger on ‘John’, which is all double-tracked vocals and a weird Prophet VS7 sitting on top of countless levels of delay. Told you they were clever.
With so much incredible new music on the horizon, Twenty Committee look set to become the next big name to emerge from Scandinavia. Bringing more of that diverse and ground-breaking aesthetic that we have come to love from that part of the world, Anders Källmark is a man with a purpose, and that is to give us the very best that his kaleidoscopic mind has to offer.
