Awaking the fire: thoughts on Forever Still

Surya, London, 30.04.2015

I happen to commute through King's Cross station to go to work. I usually come back around six in the afternoon, and anyone commuting in London during peak time knows what this means: desperately trying to avoid the massive crowds and get home as quickly as possible. But not me. Rather than going home, I have this impulse to walk down the road to a nearby music venue. This is where I saw Forever Still play live, and ever since I can't help wishing I was able to experience their concert all over again. With this thought in mind I smile, and then I take a deep breath and unwillingly find my way through the massive crowds. 

Forever Still's Open Wound Tour brought them to the UK for the first time this spring. Simultaneously they released the Save Me EP, a follow-up to the Scars EP that came out last November. These two releases, together with a forthcoming third EP, will form the basis of the band's first album, the concept of which traces the course of a woman from personal crisis to empowerment. Forever Still are based in Copenhagen, and a first glimpse into their work was offered by the Breaking Free EP in 2013. Their current line-up is Maja Schønning on vocals, Mikkel Haastrup on bass, guitar, keyboards and drums, and Dennis Post on guitar.
 

Apparently Forever Still have made an impression; online reviews and comments overflow with superlative adjectives and comparisons with bands like Evanescence or Lacuna Coil. Such tropes and conventions of music criticism may be understandable as a form of praise, but it seems to me that the question remains, and given that there are so many new, talented, and hard-working bands it is rather obvious: why Forever Still?

Maja Schønning and Mikkel Haastrup's collaborative songwriting is a useful starting point, chiefly because of their addictive melodies and articulate rhythmic patterns. These two features, sometimes merged together, and other times juxtaposed to one another, complement their lyrics addressing pain, loss and, ultimately, hope. The strength of the songs, however, stems from the clarity and coherence of their structure. There is hardly a note more or less than necessary here; in this respect, and despite the difference of genre, one is tempted to make a comparison with the starkness and intimacy of Nirvana's songwriting. Even when stripped down to their bare bones, as in the case of the acoustic version of The Last Day, the songs maintain their expressiveness, just as they thrive on their arrangement for amplified instruments. 

Inasmuch as composition and arrangement are important, music is first and foremost sound, which is why major rock and metal bands relied upon the production of a particular sonic identity; a classic example here would be Deep Purple's pursue of the aesthetic of a live performance during the recording of Machine Head. Unlike bands who spend time and money in the studio to construct a rich albeit artificial sound they cannot reproduce in concert, Forever Still come across on record as transparently natural, courtesy of Mikkel Haastrup, who is also the band's producer and recording engineer. Forever Still's sound seems to capture the physicality of their performance on stage, as well as combine stellar professionalism with a warm handmade quality that informs the band's distinct character.

And then of course there is Maja Schønning, whose vocal abilities have been met with unanimous praise. This is hardly surprising given that she is gifted with a voice that listeners can easily be impressed by and respond to;  however, as her modesty and lack of self-indulgence demonstrate, this does not seem to be a goal of hers. On the contrary, and like any major singer regardless of genre, Maja seems to be concerned with and consistently working on the way her voice operates in the context of the music. And whether she carries out and sustains the melody throughout Save Me, or improvises the chorus on top of Denis Post's tasteful guitar licks at the end of Once In A Nightmare, or shifts from the elegance of her breath to the might of her growl in Breathe In, Maja makes the choices that best serve her material.

Last but not least, Forever Still's musical identity is inseparable from their independence as a band; in other words, there is a correlation between being honest and being independent. See, for instance, the credits of the Save Me EP: composition and arrangement, production and engineering, mixing and mastering, even photography and design, are all attributed to either Maja or Mikkel. And in this respect, independence first and foremost means full artistic control, just as it means tons of devotion and hard work, which any autonomous endeavour entails and requires.

It is no secret of course that the profit-orientation of the music business promotes standardization over originality and creativity.  More often than not rare gems have come and gone unnoticed, if they ever surfaced at all, while heavily promoted commercial outputs prevailed despite being unbearably conventional; or rather, exactly because of that. A walk along the platforms of the London Underground, for instance, can easily demonstrate advertisements of hyped-up albums destined to be forgotten a few years down the line. Welcome to the machine, as Pink Floyd once put it. 

The development of digital technology and the emergence of the Web 2.0 era have created new platforms of accessing, distributing and sharing music with a potential of transcending the confines of the music industry, from Radiohead's pay-what-you-want online release of the In Rainbows album, to Kingfisher Sky's production of the Arms of Morpheus album through crowdfunding. Forever Still make their music available online, to their credit on a pay-what-you-want/free download basis; and inasmuch as their output has been praised, the fact that it is a result of self-management needs to be acknowledged in equal measure. In other words, it seems to me that any independent band is in effect a call to independent-minded fans and music lovers who understand and support both the music and the context of its production. 

Back in the 90s, long before the expansion of broadband and the emergence of Web 2.0, I used to listen to an independent radio programme every Sunday. Ιt was wonderfully diverse, in that it included music from all rock/metal genres on both sides of the Atlantic, all the way from Dream Theater to Decoryah. But there was one particular time I remember being literally drawn next to the speakers as if attracted by an irresistible magnet, desperately trying to absorb every single note that was aired; that was Eleanor, from The Gathering's Mandylion album.

Times change and music styles differ, but exquisite creativity is not hard to recognize; and it is for such reasons that discovering Forever Still can be so intriguing. In what concerns their upcoming album, it seems to me that one should expect nothing less than Iggy Pop's view that "a good LP is a being, it is not a product; it has a life force, a personality, and a history just like you and me." I have of course no way of knowing what the response will be or what the future will bring for Forever Still. I am not a fortune teller, but then again maybe I am to some extent; I do know, for instance, that I will hardly find myself again at King's Cross station without having this impulse to walk down the road to another Forever Still concert.