Denmark’s Vinyl Floor is Back With New Music

There are top-shelf acts out there now who have toiled for years building increasingly unassailable discographies that you just don’t hear about it. It’s a subsurface world of talent that doesn’t cut it for mainstream media for classic reasons – it isn’t readily identifiable. Profiteers in every field may have long since figured out how to continually keep manufacturing better mousetraps, or at least the illusion thereof, but the ability to market music, books, or any art under the narrowest possible terms is more important than ever. It isn’t even necessarily important that you’re honest. The key is getting them to listen/watch/read and, in order to do that, you need an identity.

Vinyl Floor, for the purposes of commercial argument, is an alternative rock band. From this point forward in the review, I cease to care about that label. Vinyl Floor’s Funhouse Mirror contains ten tracks that are a lot “pop”, a lot rock, a little hard rock in places, techno-influenced in others, and generally governed by a wide-open sense of possibility you don’t readily hear from similar artists.

The opener “Anything You Want” gives us our first audible taste of that scope. Out-front drumming is very important to the project’s sound on several tracks and its presence in this song sets an authoritative yet straightforward tone for the remainder of the album. Daniel and Thomas Charlie Pedersen, the “band”, share the album’s lead vocals and their voices share a common ground that gives the album critical continuity,

They have a perhaps natural affinity for vocal harmonies. What impresses me most, however, are the subtle threads running through the vocal performances. Their phrasing sensitivity has similar depth; both singers are equally skilled at investing the album’s tracks with the requisite gravitas, feeling, and/or respect. “Clock with No Hands” is one of the album’s best illustrations of the diversity they possess and their ability to pivot.

It shifts the musical focus from bright-eyed pop with a stomp in the opener towards a more artful and considered arrangement with this song. Attentive listeners will likely pick this cut as the one with the best lyrics, but others will vie for the spot as well. Vinyl Floor keeps themselves tethered to earth in this respect and an excellent example of that comes with the third track “Between Lines Undone” which begins in arguably the most literal fashion possible, mid-story, ‘That time that I blew you off/And you walked on home” delivered with the same vocal excellence defining all of the songs.

The conversational slant of the writing helps listeners connect. “Dear Apollon”, however, gives fuller vent to the brothers’ poetic talents and the dizzying wordplay isn’t empty verbal fireworks. There’s real significance behind these words and the vocal commitment gives them additional weight. They revisit the opener’s musical territory for the title song. “Funhouse Mirror” lives up to its title, however, with some imaginative musical turns along the way. The Pedersens accomplishing this without plunging overboard is impressive. “Days” concludes Funhouse House with the swirling theatricality of the classic releases it emulates in one form or another. Vinyl Floor is far from a tribute act, they aren’t imitations, and the splendid rise and fall of the album’s final curtain put a bold exclamation point on this gem. 

Timothy Ball