skandinavian_Artists > Nephew

INTERKOM KOM IND has already sold more than 40.000 copies allowing the band to add yet another platinum album to the trophies.

Once again the commercial success walks hand in hand with the artistic, that is, if one are to believe the reviews. Overall there’s great enthusiasm from most critics.

National newspaper Politiken gives away five stars out of six and writes: ”the musical role models and inspiration are still clear, but the personal touch and integrity is much stronger on this brilliant new album”.

Newspaper Jyllandsposten also offers 5 stars writing: “the listener is in risk of addiction to the new album because every single song allures with an almost absurd melodic magnetism and drama”.

Yet another 5 stars from Urban which states that Nephew on their new album gives: “a surprisingly elegant and fully raised finger to the artistic suicide that threatened to make an end to the band.”

Denmark’s most read music magazine GAFFA also praises the new album and adds: ”the new album is even a star better than it’s predecessor. Well done – and welcome again!”.

The two concerts this fall (Voxhall, Aarhus and Vega, Copenhagen) are already sold out and sales for the forthcoming 2007 tour are running fast across the entire country. Some venues are sold out already.



Okt. 2006


NEPHEW - USADSB

The album USADSB is an explosion of energetic musical expressions, words, slogans and phrases from everyday life, where the well-known and unknown, the mundane and the extraordinary, melt together in universe that is Nephew’s very own. The requirement for all the tracks on USADSB has been that it needs to be music you can’t help but nodding your head to.

This simple yet effective guideline for the music was agreed upon by the original four members of the band; Simon Kwamm (lead vocal & keyboards), Kristian Riis (guitars), Kasper Toustrup (bass) and Søren Arnholt (drums), when they in 2002 spent 14 days in a summer house in order to decide what characterises a proper Nephew track.
(Keyboard player Rene Thalund has joined the band since then).

The band was formed in 1996 and released their first album “Swimming Time” in 2002. The debut album was well received by both audiences and critics alike. However, some critics had a somewhat difficult time understanding the lyrical experiments, in which Danish words and phrases were part of the English lyrics. But this was all part of establishing the fact that Nephew didn’t sound quite like any other Danish band.

2000 was a hectic year with concerts in both Denmark and Germany. Nephew was finally close to breaking through and a future as a successful professional band no longer seemed unrealistic. The only problem was that none of the four band members thought that being part of Nephew was any fun anymore. The members dragged themselves to the rehearsal studio and various gigs, as were it nothing more than a tedious chore. The spark was gone and for a couple of months of 2001 Nephew didn’t exist at all – not even in the minds of the band members.

Despite the non-existence of the band they decided to force themselves to go to Germany for a big festival gig – they thought of it as a sort of goodbye concert. Instead it became the rebirth of Nephew! As they were no longer weighed down by ambitions or highflying plans they were able to focus on what really was essential to them – making great music and not caring whether or not if it was possible to make a living from it. After this, Nephew would be an exclusive band where the members would come together for the music when they have something interesting and relevant to offer – and otherwise mind their civilian jobs as respectively doctor, tv-personality, manager and student.

Since the four band members cancelled Nephew’s break-up that summer’s night in Germany, they have worked ambitiously to refine their expression further. Most of the tracks on USADSB have been recorded live in a studio to get the best possible energetic expression. Furthermore, Simon Kvamm has switched around the ratio of Danish and English, so that it is now the Danish language that dominates the lyrics. Both lyrics and music can seem chaotic and disconnected but don’t be fooled. Once you are inside Nephew’s universe everything comes together in perfect harmony – and it’s guaranteed that you’ll be able to nod your head to all of it!


USADSB
Danish reviews


One of the very best and most motherfucking swinging rock’n’roll releases of the year.
- Information

USADSB is a minimalistic – almost- masterpiece containing a display of sharp pop melodies and poetic snapshot lyrics
- ***** Politiken

Fucking great – the most refreshing, original and spell-binding music to come out of Denmark for a long time
- ***** EB

An enriching and thoroughly honest acquaintance – USADSB contains nothing but good songs.
- ***** dr/musik

Another proof that the Danish music scene is in better shape than ever
- **** Gaffa

It sounds great, when a band for once does exactly what it wants
- **** Jydske Vestkysten



USADSB
Track by track:

Movie Klip: About being a spectator sitting in the cheap-seat section of life, while others live in the fast lane, popping off to Paris, while you get your jollies by popping down to the newsstand for a pack of smokes. For the record, this is Nephew’s first attempt – and it worked – at doing a shuffle song.
Superliga: A love song with a gossip-magazine delivery, sparked by lots of luminaries lurking in the wings. But none of the celebrities featured on the glossy pages can really make it to: being the love of a lifetime, the top division, the Superliga.
Blå & Black: A little bottle of concentrated tattoo ink. A pathos-filled duet with Henriette Sennenvaldt from Under Byen, about groveling in the gravel in order to give the world a symbol of true love. The song pays subtle tribute to Depeche Mode.
Milk & Wine: A song you should listen to when you hook up with friends and everybody brings along a six-pack or two. As the title suggests, Nephew’s music appeals to a broad audience, so it’s OK to listen along even if you prefer wine or milk.
Dårlig Træning: Introspective and slightly depressive song told through soccer metaphors, about those days when you just don’t feel like your old self. Simon’s younger brother performs on this one, sounding like an entire string section.
En Wannabe Darth Vader: Speedway rock with ambiguous, mirthful lyrics about believing you’re a real badass. But there’s always someone who’s badder, someone who is Evil personified. That’s why you can never be more than a wannabe Darth Vader.
Worst/Best Case Scenario: This song has been following Nephew around for a long time, and existed in various versions until it finally struck a chord and cleared the “bopping the head” bar, a criterion for the success of a Nephew song.
Ordenspoliti: Sometimes you simply need your own personal vice squad (ordenspoliti in Danish) to keep yourself in line. That’s why the song oscillates between being very sure of – and unsure of – yourself. Horns feature in the track, something Nephew has never tried before, but then there’s a first time for everything.
USA DSB: The atmosphere this song creates hits the nail right on the head in terms of what Nephew is all about, and what the album is all about -- so it got promoted to title track.
Bazooka: The rodeo bug can bite us all. Just as you finish building a little fortress for yourself, and is about to crawl in and watch the world go round, you suddenly feel like tearing it down instead.



Jan 2006.



NEPHEW USADSB

Some guys have all the luck! For the Danish band Nephew, 2004 turned out to be one of those years most bands can only dream about. They’ve swept up all the most prestigious music awards and sold 90.000 albums to earn themselves a 2 X platinum record – and there’s more to come.

Not only that, their live performances of the past year have been hailed as major musical events in Denmark. It all adds up to quite a remarkable achievement for these four men who confess to be just “part-time rock stars.” Their musical inspiration is mainly British, their lyrics are mostly in Danish -- but if it weren’t for Germany, they wouldn’t exist as a band. An explanation about the German connection will come a little later.
The tracks on the album USADSB (DSB is the name of the Danish State Railways) create an explosion of musical charges, words, slogans and phrases from everyday life, where the familiar and the unfamiliar, the great and the small, the near and the far, are tempered into a cohesive universe that is the exclusive domain of Nephew. The common denominator for all songs on USADSB is a core value, a guarantee you can’t help but bop your head to the music. This simple, yet effective, musical direction was laid out and ratified by the four members of the group: Simon Kvamm (vocals and keyboards), Kristian Riis (guitar), Kasper Toustrup (bass) and Søren Arnholt (drums). They committed themselves to this simple rule of thumb in 2001, when they spent a fortnight out in the country to make decisions about what would characterize a true Nephew song. If a prospective number could not pass the test, it wasn’t destined to be part of USADSB, which was three years in the making.

The cornerstone of Nephew was laid in the autumn of 1996 when the members met each other at Aarhus University. Their common love for melodic pop/rock, however, lasted longer than their love for academia, and pretty soon Nephew was headed straight for an international breakthrough. There was no shortage of ambition nor enthusiasm. That the record companies weren’t exactly beating a path to their door didn’t stop them, and Nephew rapidly proved to be a band that refused to throw in the towel. Even in their first year of existence, Nephew made the semi-finals of DM i Rock, a national battle of the bands. In 1998 their first demo CD, Tunes, was completed – all 500 units – and sent round to record companies, venues and radio stations, to give them a taste of the group’s talent. The labels continued to turn their backs on the band, but little by little demand for Nephew as a live act grew. Experiences from all the live performances caused the band to reevaluate their way of expressing music. Maybe they were cluttering the music by trying to do too many things at once? Maybe they had moved too far in the direction of being an up-tempo pop band? At any rate, they began to work toward the objectives of creating a tighter, more focused musical expression with room for experimentation and less crowd-pleasing fluff.
After a while, Nephew was ready to record the band’s first album Swimming Time, which was released in April 2000. The public and the critics received the set with open arms, although certain members of the latter group had something of a difficult time understanding Simon Kvamm’s lyrical experiments: Danish terms and phrases woven into the English lyrics. But precisely this element sonically distanced Nephew from any other Danish band. The fabled year 2000 became a hectic period, with concerts in Denmark and Germany. Nephew was finally poised to for a breakthrough and the prospects of a future as a successful professional band were no longer unrealistic. But there was one hitch: None of the four band mates felt it was fun to play music or to be Nephew any longer. The band members dragged their asses into the rehearsal studio and to gigs as if they were going to a funeral. The spark was gone. Like that other Dane, it was a question of “to be or not to be?” For a few months of 2001, Nephew ceased to exist, even inside the members’ heads.
But they later twisted their own arms and forced themselves to head out on the road for a festival gig in Germany, a kind of farewell concert. That’s when fate stepped in and, presto, Nephew was born again. Unburdened by ambition or highfalutin plans, they were able to concentrate on what was really important to them; to make good music and not care a monkey’s ass about whether they could make a living at it or not. From here on in, Nephew would strictly be a band, a hub, where the members would meet exclusively for the sake of music, but only when they had something interesting and worthwhile to offer. What’s more, they vowed not to quit their day jobs.
From the time the four members of the band cancelled the break-up of Nephew one summer evening in Germany, they began to aim toward the singular goal of sharpening their musical expression even more. Most of the tracks on USADSB were recorded live in the studio to capture as much of the energy as possible. When USADSB was finally released at home in June 2004, all of the efforts paid off and Nephew got the kind of reviews only a handful of artists are ever lucky enough to get: “Some of the most refreshing, original and damned emphatic music ever to sprout from Danish soil”; and, “A minimalist masterpiece with a monumental menagerie of razor-sharp pop melodies.” Three days after release of the album, Nephew stood before 15,000 fans on a stage at the Roskilde Festival. The critics would call the concert: “The best live performance at the festival.”
Following the Roskilde Festival, USADSB took the pole position on the Danish album chart, and stayed there for 4 weeks. How popular they had become never really dawned on Nephew until they set off on a tour of Denmark that autumn. The public had taken the band’s subtle, wry lyrics to heart. Fans entered the Nephew galaxy and even brought light swords to the venues for fencing along to the sound of “En Wannabe Darth Vader.” Or they would switch on bicycle lights during “Worst/Best Case Scenario,” while lots of them sported T-shirts with home-made slogans inspired by the lyrics of “Superliga.”
Even though the force was with Nephew throughout a fantastic year – which they call “confirming and strange” – they still had no ambitions of becoming full-time musicians. Their day jobs are: doctor, student, music manager and TV star – and they have no intentions of quitting them. “Denmark is such a little country it can be tough to pass the time if you want to be a full-time pop star,” says Simon Kvamm. “There’s no guarantee something good will come out of forcing yourself to make a new album every year. We’ve made a rule, that we will only release new music when we ultimately cannot resist releasing it.”
Nephew is a bit excited as to how Germany will receive their Danish-language music, and do not exclude the possibility of recording in German, as the band’s lyricist, Kvamm, is fascinated by that language. But even though the German public might not understand all the words, there’s one thing to keep in mind: You can’t help but bop your head to the music.


Nephew track by track:
Movie Klip: About being a spectator sitting in the cheap-seat section of life, while others live in the fast lane, popping off to Paris, while you get your jollies by popping down to the newsstand for a pack of smokes. For the record, this is Nephew’s first attempt – and it worked – at doing a shuffle song.
Superliga: A love song with a gossip-magazine delivery, sparked by lots of luminaries lurking in the wings. But none of the celebrities featured on the glossy pages can really make it to: being the love of a lifetime, the top division, the Superliga.
Blå & Black: A little bottle of concentrated tattoo ink. A pathos-filled duet with Henriette Sennenvaldt from Under Byen, about groveling in the gravel in order to give the world a symbol of true love. The song pays subtle tribute to Depeche Mode.
Milk & Wine: A song you should listen to when you hook up with friends and everybody brings along a six-pack or two. As the title suggests, Nephew’s music appeals to a broad audience, so it’s OK to listen along even if you prefer wine or milk.
Dårlig Træning: Introspective and slightly depressive song told through soccer metaphors, about those days when you just don’t feel like your old self. Simon’s younger brother performs on this one, sounding like an entire string section.
En Wannabe Darth Vader: Speedway rock with ambiguous, mirthful lyrics about believing you’re a real badass. But there’s always someone who’s badder, someone who is Evil personified. That’s why you can never be more than a wannabe Darth Vader.
Worst/Best Case Scenario: This song has been following Nephew around for a long time, and existed in various versions until it finally struck a chord and cleared the “bopping the head” bar, a criterion for the success of a Nephew song.
Ordenspoliti: Sometimes you simply need your own personal vice squad (ordenspoliti in Danish) to keep yourself in line. That’s why the song oscillates between being very sure of – and unsure of – yourself. Horns feature in the track, something Nephew has never tried before, but then there’s a first time for everything.
USA DSB: The atmosphere this song creates hits the nail right on the head in terms of what Nephew is all about, and what the album is all about -- so it got promoted to title track.
Bazooka: The rodeo bug can bite us all. Just as you finish building a little fortress for yourself, and is about to crawl in and watch the world go round, you suddenly feel like tearing it down instead.

NEPHEW AWARDS

Nordic Music Awards (www.nordicmusicawards.dk)
Best New Danish Artist

Danish Music Awards 2005 (www.dr.dk/dma)
Album of the Year (USADSB)
Band of the Year
Song of the Year (Movie Klip)
Danish Rock album (USADSB)
Danish Music Video (Superliga)

Gaffa Prisen (www.gaffa.dk) (Award given by the biggest Danish music magazine)
Best Album (USADSB)
Best Band
Best Male Performer (Simon Kvamm)
Best new Act
Best Song (Superliga)
Best Danish Live Act

Zulu Awards (www.zulu.tv2.dk) (Award show held by the most trendy national TV-station)
Best Album (USADSB)
Best Male Performer (Simon Kvamm)

Steppeulv Prisen (www.steppeulv.dk) (Award given by the Danish critics):
Best Band
Best Live Act

P3 Prisen (www.dr.dk/p3guld) (Award show held by the Danish National Radio)Best New Band Best Song (Superliga)

Payload Price (www.payload.dba.dk) (Danish download service)
The Payload price Most Downloaded album of the year (10 X Så Live/Special live edition of USADSB)


October 2005