vinylfanatics.com

**Iceage - Plowing Into The Field Of Love**
★★★★☆

There's something beautifully perverse about a band named Iceage making their warmest, most emotionally generous album to date. By 2014, these Danish post-punk provocateurs had already carved out a reputation as purveyors of some of the most ferocious, uncompromising music to emerge from Copenhagen's underground scene. But with "Plowing Into The Field Of Love," frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt and company threw their fans a curveball wrapped in velvet and dipped in bourbon.

The journey to this point had been anything but conventional. Iceage burst onto the scene as teenagers with 2011's "New Brigade," a blistering 22-minute assault that sounded like The Birthday Party covering Rites of Spring in a Copenhagen basement during a particularly harsh winter. The album was raw, urgent, and utterly unforgiving – exactly what you'd expect from four Danish kids raised on a steady diet of hardcore punk and post-punk revival. It established them as the crown princes of Denmark's burgeoning punk scene, complete with Rønnenfelt's distinctive wail cutting through walls of distorted guitars like a rusty blade through silk.

Their follow-up, 2013's "You're Nothing," doubled down on the aggression while hinting at broader musical horizons. The production was cleaner, the songwriting more focused, but the underlying fury remained intact. Songs like "Ecstasy" and "Morals" showcased a band learning to harness their chaos without sacrificing its essential wildness. Yet nothing could have prepared listeners for the dramatic left turn that was "Plowing Into The Field Of Love."

Gone were the two-minute hardcore blasts, replaced by sprawling compositions that flirted with country, folk, and even chamber pop. The transformation was so dramatic that many wondered if this was the same band that had once incited near-riots at basement shows across Europe. But beneath the lush arrangements and mellowed tempos, the essential DNA of Iceage remained – that peculiar mix of romantic yearning and existential dread that makes Danish art so compelling.

The album's standout tracks reveal a band unafraid to explore their softer side without losing their edge. "The Lord's Favorite" opens with gentle acoustic strumming before building into a gospel-tinged anthem that would feel at home in a Nick Cave fever dream. Rønnenfelt's vocals, once purely confrontational, now carry traces of vulnerability that make his declarations of devotion feel genuinely moving rather than ironic. "Simony" pushes even further into unexpected territory, with strings and horns creating a cinematic backdrop for what amounts to Iceage's most accessible song to date.

Perhaps most surprising is "Abundant Living," which finds the band channeling their inner country crooners with a swagger that shouldn't work but absolutely does. The track's shuffling rhythm and twangy guitars create space for Rønnenfelt to explore themes of desire and redemption with a maturity that belies his young age. Meanwhile, "Forever" serves as the album's emotional centerpiece, a slow-burning ballad that builds to a cathartic climax worthy of their hardcore past.

The album wasn't without its detractors. Longtime fans accused the band of selling out, of abandoning the very qualities that made them special in the first place. But such criticism missed the point entirely. "Plowing Into The Field Of Love" wasn't a betrayal of Iceage's core identity – it was an expansion of it. The same restless energy that drove their early hardcore experiments now pushed them toward new sonic territories, proving that evolution and authenticity aren't mutually exclusive.

In the years since its release, "Plowing Into The Field Of Love" has been vindicated by time and influence. The album paved the way for a generation of post-punk bands unafraid to incorporate diverse influences into their sound. More importantly, it established Iceage as artists capable of genuine surprise, setting the stage for future experiments that would continue to confound and delight in equal measure.

Today, the album stands as a crucial pivot point in Iceage's discography – the moment when Denmark's angriest young men discovered they had hearts as well as fists. It remains their most divisive work, but also perhaps their most essential, proving that the most interesting art often comes from artists brave enough to risk everything in service of growth.