SHINING — In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be a Monster (review)

SHINING — In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be a Monster album cover

Album · 2005 · Metal Related

4/5 · 2020-12-26
siLLy puPPy

After two albums of pure acoustic jazz that in reality resulted in competent tribute sessions to early 1960s John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, SHINING’s mastermind Jørgen Munkeby decided to radically change the band’s musical style on the third album IN THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH YOU WILL BE A MONSTER. The musical style was inspired by fellow Norwegian band Motorpsycho who itself had transmogrified from a typical stoner rock band to a unique classically infused progressive rock band. While this stylistic shift saw the same quartet that performed on the first two albums, there was a great shakeup of instrumentation as well as including a few guest musicians that added touches of French horn, trombone, trumpet and even tubular bells.

Munkeby continued to play his usual avant-garde jazz saxophone, flute and clarinet parts but also took on the additional duties of electric and acoustic guitars, electric bass, piano, mellotron, church organ, celestra, harmonium and accordion. He also added the unthinkable sounds of drum programming which gives the album an electronica crossover feel thus bringing SHINING into the world of nu jazz which they had decided to avoid when they started out. Pianist Morten Qvenild continued with an expanded keyboard palette that included Rhodes piano, synthesizers, clavinet, celesta, mellotron and drum machine programming but clearly was not on board with these new experimental sounds and left the band before the album was even released.

Likewise bassist Aslak Hartberg would switch to electric bass and doubling on drum machines and samplers but was also not feeling Munkeby’s passion for this new weirder experimental music and left before the next album “Grindstone.” The only other member that wasn’t significantly affected was drummer Torstein Lofthus who continued to perform his technical percussive prowess and stuck around for the next several albums which experienced the band’s most successful period. After existing in the world of jazz for a few years, the band had to reinvent itself and moved to the Rune Grammofon record label which specialized in experimental and improvisational music. From this point on SHINING would never look back at its jazz origins and continue to pioneer some of the most bizarre jazz hybridization in all of the rock universe.

IN THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH YOU WILL BE A MONSTER was strongly influenced by the French classical composer Olivier Messiaen and his complex mode of limited transposition which by definition refers to musical modes or scales that fulfill specific criteria relating to their symmetry and the repetition of their interval groups. Although inspired by the more avant-garde world of Western classical music, IN THE KINGDOM was more of a bizarre mix of progressive rock and experimental jazz that included moments of metal bombast, the latter of which would be fully unleashed on future releases. The album also featured a plethora of electronic noises by means of synthesizers and drum machines and sounds more like something Squarepusher would release than SHINING’s early two albums.

While jazz purists who reveled in the band’s effort to revisit the early 60s with uncanny purity may have felt betrayed, for those who long for the next prestigious example of art rock that includes an ecstatic orgy of sonic differentials, IN THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH YOU WILL BE A MONSTER is a monster indeed with avant-garde classical underpinnings teasing the sounds of acoustic jazz, industrial noise effects and progressive rock accoutrements into a spell-casting series of dreamy sequences punctuated by random sounds of cathedral organs and accordions which collectively allude to a plethora of cultural references. While this album serves more of a transition album between the jazz beginnings and the prog metal experimentalism that followed, despite existing as a unique entry in the band’s canon is an intriguing and oft exhilarating listening experience.

While retro-jazz is a satisfying tool of mastery for up and coming musicians, the wealth of classic jazz negates any true need for modern releases that don’t have something new to offer and luckily Munkeby got that memo. The decision to take the plunge into the unknown was a wise one as IN THE KINGDOM was well received by critics and caught the proper attention outside of the confines of Norway and despite tamping down the jazz still won the Alarm Award for best jazz album in 2006. This is indeed one of those extremely complex heady albums that dwells in abstractness and surreality and for those not indoctrinated into the complexities of avant-garde jazz and 20th century classical music dressed up with weird as fuck electronica, this will probably come off as a bunch of random noise for most the album’s playing time but for those who relish these rare moments of competency then this album is quite satisfying indeed. While the metal aspects are minimal at this point, the right ingredients had been sowed for a fruitful harvest that would culminate on the band’s following release “Grindstone.”