published on
Release date: January 1st 2013.
Order the cassette: http://www.almost-musique.com/2012/11/younolovebunny-happy-nation-ii/
A new member, Claus Frøhlich, just joined the family of crazy songwriters, hyperactively obsessed, innocent and lo-fi (the uncles Daniel Johnston and Jonathan Richman, the grandfather R. L. Burnside, the almost first cousins Jeffrey Lewis and Phil Elvrum, etc.). Claus Frøhlich is Younolovebunny: a multi-instrumentalist one-man-band, half anthropologist (as he stopped his studies before the end).
Claus was born in 1982 and grew up in a farm in southern Denmark, in the suburbs of a small town, surrounded by cows, tractors, horses, hunters and pig holdings. He slightly prefers music to farm work. Now he lives in Copenhagen. When he needed a band name, he chose the name of this video game, Younolovebunny. This is also what Thai prostitutes reply to men who reject their sexual advances: YOU NO LOVE BUNNY.
Younolovebunny wrote and recorded more than 700 songs and knocked up around 40 albums – including one made of 200 songs - secretly half-released, without calculation. Whenever a friend asks him for his last album, he prefers to record a new one: easier, more logical, more fun. Or how to develop a topsy turvy career without bother. If Claus had been born in Seattle, he would surely have had a long discography on established and/or legendary independent labels. But Claus was born in a farm and, instead of lounging around in the Bahamas, he works for the only tv channel in the world dedicated to disabled people. A fraction of American underground pop culture live from a pig farm in Denmark.
At Almost Musique, we came across Younolovebunny one night on the internet, almost by accident, on the site of the English label Fat Cat Records (Animal Collective, Sigur Ros) which selected Younolovebunny for its 2011 annual compilation of demo tracks (http://demo.fat-cat.co.uk/). A track, a ton of strange bootleg videos and some investigations made it clear that the Bunny fell through all the cracks and remained the happy and anonymous author of a plentiful, fresh and marvelous discography that had never been released. Claus sends us his 700 tracks and we immerse ourselves in the curious work of the Danish artist. We can hear the K records spirit (Beat Happening, Microphones/Mt. Eerie), some grunge (The Breeders meet Nirvana), some analogical fixing, bits of Modern Lovers, simple, sensitive and dark indie folk, blurred feelings echoing the nineties in some way. Sometimes highly psychedelic pop, sometimes almost punk, sometimes completely lo-fi, a musical and “an album that changes the world” ("Albummet Der Aendrede Verden") and then the world changed. A generational quintessence recorded on a four-track tape like in (or since) 1992.
"Happy Nation II" (cf. "Happy Nation", the first Ace of Base album) is a first official draft recording that circumvents completeness to better reveal the gross matter of Younolovebunny. Claus reworked some of his tracks and we start with this humble introduction on a tape (and on digital media) by drawing from his crazy work: rock with synthetic levels (Ozonomio), advert punk and power pop (Whip It), broken and dirty surf garage (Attention) or troubled and shady and troubling weird folk (What I See)… A UFO disconnected from mass production, anti-highway, re-released even before it had been released.
- Genre
- Lo-fi Grunge