Carsten Bojsen (Denmark) – Hunger (single)
I’ve been in contact with Carsten Bojsen this week and strangely this latest composition of his wasn’t mentioned.
‘Hunger’ is a heavier song altogether than the previous one, the gentle, Johnny Cash-like ‘I have seen the light’, one that, the more I listen to it the more I’m convinced it should be attached to a TV advert as it drags you in through its amazingly catchy chorus line.
‘Hunger’’s message lies somewhere between Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the summertime’ with its unforgettable lines “In the summer time, you’ve got women, you’ve got women on your mind”…”Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find”, and Irene Cara’s ‘Fame’ by which I mean he has this insatiable “hunger for life.”
Musically it moves with the steady, unrelenting pace of Chris Rea’s ‘Driving home for Christmas’ but unlike any Rea song I ever heard Carsten’s punctuated it with very Anna Calvi like forceful guitar and synthesiser interventions.
Emerging out of all this are original pieces of work with real quality.
I only just realised that Carsten is a music teacher. I hope those kids are paying attention.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carsten.bojsen
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carstenbojsen/
X: https://x.com/BojsenCarsten
Amilost (Norway) – Afterthought (ft. Nick Wilson)
Just a brief explanation, as things can be misunderstood: Nick Wilson wasn’t an ‘afterthought’; ‘the King of sad songs’ as he is known was always intended to feature in Amilost’s latest attention-grabbing single.
Amilost was listed in our Songs of the Year round up last December and came pretty damn close to a Top 5 slot with the brilliant ‘Tiny War.’
Break ups and their aftermath feature heavily in their repertoire but ‘Afterthought’ is concerned, as the title suggests, with that person you pretend not to be thinking about while in reality you can’t get them out of your head. The one you never actually got to know well, however desperate you were to do that and who is now just another ship that passed in the night.
While ‘Tiny War’ developed from a ballad to an anthem from the battlefield, ‘Afterthought’ always stays well within itself and isn’t able to extricate itself from and rise above the clinging melancholy:
“If you saw me at a party would I be invisible
If you passed me in the hallway would you even look?
Would you still know my body or am I forgettable.”
(I’m assuming the body reference here means vague recognition rather than carnal knowledge or otherwise it wouldn’t make sense).
Later that melancholy shifts into what is almost confused desperation:
“I never said it
I never said it
I wish I had said it
I wish I had said it
Maybe so don’t worry though
Cos I never said it.”
I have mixed feelings about Nick Wilson’s vocal contribution. For maximum effect I sense he should have had a deeper voice than the almost falsetto that prevails here.
On the other hand he gets the best lines in the song:
“Could I call you on the landline?
The blue one by the kitchen door
I wonder if you miss me?
The way you missed my calls.”
That last line sums up the song and its empathy with plain bad luck. I’ve used the analogy before but will do again – the British TV black comedy Love Soup from the early 2000s in which two people who were perfect for each other somehow managed never to meet.
In the very final scene of the last episode they are sat in a theatre, both of them alone, two rows apart, grimacing at a theatrical ‘farce’ (which the the British love), the rest of the audience howling with laughter at the childlike inanity on stage. They still fail to find each other.
If you think of that scene while listening to this song I suggest you’ll like it even more.
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amilostmusic/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_amilost_/
