Katzenjammer -- Le Pop (2008)

I want to begin this post by telling you how vexed I am by the fact that Katzenjammer (a German loanword meaning, literally, "the lament of the cat," or, in slang, "hangover") is a group that I cannot put squarely into any one genre.  But that's trite.  The number of reviews that open with "So-and-so is a group that defies categorization" or some variant thereof makes me a little bit sick.  I'll spare you that.  What I will say is that Katzenjammer, an English-language Norwegian band, composed of Anne Marit Bergheim, Marianne Sveen, Solveig Heilo and Turid Jørgensen  is at least unorthodox, if not downright diverse.  Listed variously as pop, folk pop, or indie folk, this group at times blurs the lines between folk and ska with their extensive use of trumpet in "A Bar in Amsterdam" of "Le Pop," always makes liberal use of chimes and accordion and take turns switching off on the vocals.  If anything, Katzenjammer could be described as the love-child of Gogol Bordello and Earl Scruggs.  After an "Overture," of all things, and "A Bar in Amsterdam," "Le Pop" goes from  a lighter, tinkly, higher-voices-heavy "Tea with Cinnamon", through a set of darker, strong-beated tunes, to the titular track, "Le Pop," which feels exactly like watching preteens with an attention deficit disorder run around a carnival must.  It wraps up with some vaguely French, vaguely gospel, energetic songs, a set of sea shanties, and finally ends with a banjo-led classic "Ain't No Thang."  And it does all this while maintaining extraordinarily good flow from track to track (On typing this, I had to correct three of the song titles, as I had thought that they were simply part of the previous tracks).  Jazzy?  No.  The sort of thing you would ever want to admit to listening to in any social context that merits a tie? Decidedly not.  Even so, Katzenjammer, though drawing inspiration from a broadly traditional folk genre, manages to play something that feels urban, possibly even cosmopolitan, in stark contrast to folk's foot-stomping boot-wearing barn-dancing proud-to-be-an-American connotation.  This album feels like the sort of thing a city-dwelling hipster would listen to in place of proper folk.  The motifs they take from both Western European and American folk lends an air of catchy danceability, but the revision of the tunes into cohesive sounds gives it polish, and turns it into something almost original. And something about that is extraordinarily compelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kbdCDeKSoI