Send "The Whitest Boy Alive " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Dustedmagazine |
 Something’s not right here: Rules either grooves more than an introspective album is supposed to or introspects more than a groove album is supposed to. It’s all sleekness and shuffle on the way down, and all eloquent discomfiture inside; it sounds like lounge music that narrates the lives and loves of people who are terribly embarrassed by the idea of setting foot inside a lounge. As paradoxes go this is all pretty tame, but in the hands of Erlend Øye, who brought us “quiet is the new loud” at the beginning of the decade, it feels like something of great consequence, as though a whole generation’s sense of self hangs in the balance. Are we supposed to believe that shag carpet and adult situations is the new quiet? Maybe, yeah. That’s pretty obviously the point, in at least a few ways. The contrast between the post-disco aesthetic of Rules and its stripped-bare narrative content is as deliberate as anything else therein, including the fact that the songs were all recorded in one take and composed to be exactly replicable on stage. Øye bares as much soul as he ever did in Kings of Convenience, his fretful-lover croon investing real dimension in “when you only want someone when that someone’s gone” and “you will lose me as a friend if you cross that line” – but this while the track beneath him lopes away to hit on the girl you came in with. The non-entity of a rhythm section that held together 2006’s Dreams is irrepressibly and lustily alive here, together and not quite taut, laying down absurdly smooth vamps even when channeling Daft Punk (“1517”) or Tom Vek (“Courage”) to middling effect....full text |
| Popmatters |
| By now some may be frustrated with Erlend Øye’s refusal to expand his vocal horizons. The Norwegian singer has moved from folk to electronic, but whatever genre he tackles, he maintains that same effortlessly smooth, refrained and detached voice. However, while some may find Øye’s voice clinical, it is also what makes his projects so unique; the music and the vocals blend together to produce one smooth, singular, wistfully daydreaming expression. Since emerging on the scene, Øye has led somewhat of a double life. He has played frontman to a number of outfits. His band Kings of Convenience helped pioneer the new acoustic movement in 2001, delivering a debut full of delicate, whispery folk. His other artistic persona indulges the MC inside him as the singer to the minimalistic dance-pop band the Whitest Boy Alive. The band’s 2002 debut, Dreams, contained lyrics of relationships and heartache set to smooth electronic beats, creating a chilly atmosphere of winter crispness. The album maintained that delicate wistfulness and melancholy unique to Øye. This year’s Rules is more inclined toward old-school lounge jazz than its predecessor, with cool, understated jams mixed with modern European electronics. As can be expected, each element of the sound has been applied with obsessive meticulousness, creating melodies both unfailingly polite and slyly innovative....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| One of my favorite singles last year was Fred Falke's remix of the Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage", a glossy, euphoric piece of electro-pop that mutated a gentle, unassuming disco comedown into a late-decade bookend to Daft Punk's "Digital Love". Yet despite the way Falke's remix brought out the best qualities of his syrupy, lonesome voice, Whitest Boy (and Kings of Convenience) head Erlend Øye is most comfortable when he's a bit subdued and quiet. And as much as massive house beats complement his vocals, he seems most at home when his musical surroundings undergo the same state of half-withdrawn restraint that he's in. Even in shifting from Kings of Convenience's acoustic pastoralism to the plugged-in, dance-friendly pop of the Whitest Boy Alive, Øye seemed like he was aiming not for bars or nightclubs, but the headphones of people walking down empty streets. The abandoned-dancefloor atmosphere of 2006's Dreams made TWBA a surprising side-project debut, but sophomore album Rules expands the mood just a little-- and, in the process, the sound gets a little more crowded. Where its predecessor let the rhythm breathe and gave most of the attention to Øye's sleepy murmur and his loudly echoing, desolate-sounding guitar, Rules pushes the beats just a bit more forward and has Øye's riffs sharing a tighter space with Daniel Nentwig's expanded, more prominent palette of synths and keyboards. It doesn't improve things any: With that much more emphasis placed on the backbeat and away from that bell-like guitar sound that made the original "Golden Cage" (or "Figures" or "Borders" from the debut) so haunting, the relatively upbeat moments sound a bit more like the brusque, arch Krautfunk of recent Fujiya & Miyagi. And while it seems like it'd be a good trade-off to have a version of Lightbulbs with a warmer-sounding vocalist and some actual human emotion, emphasizing the groove only reveals that bassist Marcin Oz and drummer Sebastian Maschat seem strangely hesitant about going full disco....full text |
The Whitest Boy Alive lyrics
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