LÜT – Mersmak
Release Date: 12th February 2021
Label: Indie Recordings
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Genre: Post Punk, Alt-Rock, Punk.
FFO: Kverlertak, The Hives, Pixies, Turbonegro, Blood Command.
Review By: Jonathon Hopper
In these realms. Norway may be best known for producing a stream of bombastic, blood-curdling black metal, yet the growing success of acts like Kverlertak (whose fourth album ‘Splid’ was my favourite album of 2020) and Blood Command shows that there’s more to the Nordic nation’s rock and metal output than face paint and pentagrams.
This is Scandirock… And more than two decades after the likes of the Hives, Backyard Babies and Turbonegro burst onto these shores, it’s still in the rudest of health.
Formed in Tromso in 2014, Mersmak (translation: ‘taste for more”) is LÜT’s second full length album and opens with the title track – a breezy yet infectious pop punk romp, before launching into Strictly Business, a pulsating Hives-esq blast of pure energy that you could imagine going down a storm in any number of intimate, tightly-packed venues on either side of the North Sea once we return to happier times.
It’s when LÜT slow things down just a smidge such as on the brooding LÜTetro that things get really interesting though. A rasping ode to a ravaged World that includes the memorable couplet, “en plan den brista kor legges lista/
Mista det der gullet og din lounge-barista”. (If Google Translate is to be believed, something about a plan going horribly wrong resulting in some gold and something or someone called a Lounge Barista going missing…)
It’s a four-minute symphony of dysfunction that brings to mind the aforementioned Kverlertak at their most expansive, and illustrates the progress that the five-piece have made since 2017’s fun, punky debut ‘Pandion’.
There’s even time for some knowing self-parody in the form of the breathless We Will Save Scandirock, a high stakes alt-rock rampage of chopping guitars – like Eighties B-Line Matchbox Disaster chasing the Cooper Temple Clause down a fjord.
Elsewhere, there’s the lurching bass of Bangkok Nonstop that shimmies and sways like Pixies on a road trip through a neon wasteland, the laid-back synth-laden Homme Fatale and the spiralling instrumental Krei., all with that distinctive Scandi flavouring that’s refreshing in an age where the factory setting is too often for bands to sound like they’re from everywhere and from nowhere.
Closer INDIÄ – all hypnotic rhythms and droning guitar that fits somewhere between stoner and industrial – is a suitably epic finale to an album of diverse pleasures. Scandirock in origin yet unafraid to push the envelope into more experimental areas, LÜT have already garnered acclaim from the Norwegian Grammies and none other than Lars Ulrich.
On the evidence of Mersmak, it’s not hard to see why. Now, where did I put that Lounge Barista? 
(4 / 5)
