Dancing Headlights
Sivert HøyemLPA
- Dancing Headlights
- Love Vs. The World
- The Great Upsetter
- Hurdle
LPB
- Hollow
- Summer Rain
- Living It Strange
- Some Miserable Morning
«it’s just a pop album. Not much to talk about, really — a handful of tightly arranged pop songs, organically recorded with my band, and mixed in the grandest fashion possible by Bjarne Stensli,» says Sivert Høyem.
It’s weird to hear him talk about «pop». Pop music in 2024 means programmed beats, sampled sounds and autotune. Singer, songwriter and producer are very rarely the same person. Dancing Headlights is five guys live in studio, distorted guitars and hardly a digital tool in sight. Something further removed from the pop strategies of today is hard to imagine.
«Pop holds a different meaning for me,» Sivert says. «When I was a kid, they were still playing The Beatles on the radio. The Eighties was a wonderful era for pop and rock music, and I was the right age to take it all in, not bothering too much about which ”tribe” I should belong to. Everything was permitted, and everything was also tried.
«Today, I find it harder to find pop performers to identify with. Lana del Rey is one. She is timeless without being retro, and this is my ambition as well.»
Being of the right age, it’s easy to be reminded of the golden Eighties while listening to Sivert Høyem’s 2025 incarnation. The album opens with crashing waves and a couple of hot pop zingers. First is «Dancing Headlights», which could have been a song from the heyday of a-ha, maybe with a touch of late period Roxy Music. Sivert expresses his long admiration for a-ha, but seems to have forgotten the song «Living Daylights» (their James Bond tune), which rhymes neatly. The next song, the even more catchy «Love vs. The World», recalls the delightful memory of early Eighties pop/rock, in particular the robust pop classics of the Psychedelic Furs.
Pop songs are supposed to be about love, and Sivert is your expert supplier. He is a hard-boiled romantic, carrying plenty scars from the trenches of emotional warfare. This year’s «love-me-do» attempts are full of ambivalence, irony and paranoia, but also desperation, melancholia and nostalgia. Sivert Høyem could have had a second career as a marriage counsellor.
The most daring song in this collection is «Hollow», a song he wrote backstage in a break between two corporate events. «That’s when you really get to feel the hollowness of it all,» he smiles. The emptiness gave birth to an ambitious composition, highlighting Sivert as torch singer and the ghost of Sinatra’s «My Way».
Most charming, in this listener’s opinion, is «Living it Strange», written with British guitarist Rob McVey. An aggressive swarm of distorted guitars and a fuzz bass line underpins a love story told from the edge, developing into boogie and a kind of contemporary glam rock! «There may be some influence from Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr here as well,» Sivert says when we suggest he may be heading for the Seventies, musically.
Album closer «Some Miserable Morning», with its touch of Golden Age Bob Dylan, is a rarity in pop history terms. This song was recorded live with a club audience the very first time it was performed in public. This happened at a club in Dresden named Alte Schlachthof. As the biggest Kurt Vonnegut Jr fan in the music business, Sivert naturally hoped this could be the actual site of the main story in the ultra-classic «Slaughterhouse 5», but that seems to have been located on the opposite river bank.
«As I said, there’s not really a lot to tell. I have an amazing band right now, and this material sounded so great in demo form that it just had to be captured more or less the way it was and delivered to the fans.»
That is the meaning of «pop», anyway. From the latin populus, people = loved by the many, belonging to the people.