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Artist
The Alexandria Quartet
12+ albums
indieindie popnorwegianindie rocksouthside 2009
about
For three simple words ‘I’, ‘love’ and ‘you’ have a clever way of hiding themselves, no more so than in The Alexandria Quartet’s debut album. Based in Bergen, Norway’s main student city and the country’s unofficial pop epicentre, the Quartet have been holed up in studios and rehearsal rooms for the last 18 months polishing a collection of beautiful songs bursting with love, loss and the kind of melodies that come along once in a blue moon. ‘Montauk’, inspired by the place in New York and its starring role as the place where love blooms in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, is a great introduction to the band’s songbook. “I find it interesting to write love songs,” says singer and songwriter Martin Skålnes, “but when you’re writing a love song you can’t simply say ‘I love you’. I just say ‘let me take you to Montauk, is that where we’re meant to be’.” Born in Kopervik, a small city on the west of Norway most well known for, as Martin puts it, “its drunks and its Christians”, Martin soon found out how to set his own agenda and while his friends were at church his parents would be playing him music - he states without hesitation that the first song he heard was The Searchers’ ‘Needles & Pins’, though REM would usually be on the car stereo and it wasn’t long before he fell in love with Oasis. By six he was working out his first chords on the guitar and by seven he was playing the piano; his first song, ‘Maybe’, was written when he was 11. “It started with a dream and a des
