Ex Norwegian Continues Their Dizzying Ascent With Sketch, Their Second Album Sketch Compliments the Band’s Live Shows With Tunes Full of Sonic Surprises and Intense Energy.

Ex Norwegian takes their name from a Monty Python routine about a dead parrot and while the tunes head Norwegian Roger Houdaille writes have humorous moments, this is a serious band. “I like to say we play art-rock, because there’s a lot of things happening in the music,” Houdaille says. “The songs tend to be in odd keys, with varying tempos and arrangements that go off in all directions. The lyrics are abstract, or dense, or talking about conspiracies, or ways to improve the world - and girls with moustaches. We’re all over the place.”

The first Ex Norwegian song, “Something Unreal”, was posted on MySpace in 2008. A week later, a radio station in Hawaii started streaming the song and the band was invited to perform at the CMJ convention in New York, where they blew the audience away with their stage act. Standby, the band’s first album, introduced Houdaille’s skewed pop vision and their live shows created a groundswell of fan interest.

Sketch, their new record, fulfills the promise of Standby, fleshing out Houdaille’s quirky songs with inventive flourishes from the band - Arturo Garcia, drums; Nina Souto, bass and vocals and Houdaille on guitar and lead voice. “Sketch is a band record, a result of playing together on the road for a year. Everyone contributed ideas to the songs and came up with their own parts. We produced ourselves, doing the drum tracks at a friend’s studio and overdubbing almost everything else at my place in Miami. Some last minutes tweaks were done in Manhattan.”

The songs on Sketch are an eclectic lot, moving from gentle acoustic laments to metallic power pop rockers. Houdaille’s cheery vocal surfs a wave of distorted noise on the opener “Jet Lag.” An explosion of grungy guitars creates an interesting tension with the song’s lilting melody. Souto sings lead on “You’re Elastic Over Me”, a puzzling pop tune that features echoing xylophone, acoustic guitar, synthesized strings and a cascading vocal chorus. “Smashing Time” is the tale of an embezzler thumbing his nose at the people he defrauded from an island retreat. Its crunchy guitars and driving pulse suggests mid-period Kinks. The band’s skewed tropical rhythms – somewhere between a tango and a cha cha cha - make the mysterious lyrics of “Acting On An Island” sound other worldly. Houdaille’s vocals here are mellow and detached, sounding like a crooner comfortable in the embrace of several martinis. “Girl with the Moustache” was inspired by Hole and closes the set with another mash up of hard rock and pop. The guitar break brings to mind Jimmy Page playing a George Harrison lick. The songs on Sketch flow into each other without a pause, capturing the energy of a live show, leaving you slightly off balance and ready for anything, the way all great rock bands do.

“Ex Norwegian came together in Miami Beach,” Houdaille explains. “I wouldn’t write the kind of songs I do if I lived somewhere else. That said, it’s not the kind of music you’d associate with Miami Beach. It’s not electronica, Latin or hip-hop, but being isolated from the bigger rock scenes does lend itself to the creative process in a positive way. Isolated Rock, anyone?”