Norway's 120 Days Want To Be Big, But Not Too Big

Every band have stories about paying their dues. Months on the road, playing to a handful of people, sleeping on strangers' floors and making just enough money to get by are all things we've heard from dozens of artists in the past. But how many of them get attacked by junkies on the road to rock stardom? Norway's 120 Days can claim that battle as their own.

"We bought this motor home because we moved from this small town in Norway to Oslo," bassist Jonas Dahl recalls. "We thought we were going to live in Oslo, but we ended up outside Oslo in this fancy suburb that wasn't really the neighbourhood we were looking for, so we bought this motor home, and we just drove it into the city.

"We parked it under some abandoned bridge, wrote a letter to the mayor so the police wouldn't ticket us, and we were there in summer and it was fine. But then the winter came, and the junkies started to come in, and anyone who was in the trailer ended up picking needles out of their beds. Every day we'd fight these junkies out of our motor home. So finally we moved out, sold the caravan, and I moved into some small room/rehearsal space."

After a few years in that rehearsal space, the synth-rock quartet wrote what would become their self-titled debut album. They were signed to Vice Records shortly thereafter, becoming the first Norwegian band to be signed directly to an American label.

"I think it's a press thing, to come up with something to get their headlines, but it's cool," Dahl says of the hype behind the signing. "It wasn't a very big thing for us, really.

"But we were hoping to really get somewhere instead of just hanging around Oslo for 10 years, then get married and have children, that's it. From the start, we were going to go for it and do our music and get to lots of people."

With dance music infiltrating the mainstream scene over the last couple of years, 120 Days may find a thriving market for their grandiose electronic rock, which features layer upon layer of synthesizers over a solid, guitar-driven groove. It's visceral enough to appeal to club-goers looking for a quick fix, but ethereal and experimental enough to win over fans of bands like Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros.

"There are too many bands playing regular American rock music, thinking that's the way to get into the American market, and it's very popular to copy American bands," Dahl says of the current music scene in Norway. "They all play the same kind of regular rock 'n' roll. I don't think our music is typical American music."

It's true and, unlike many of those bands, the Norwegians make no concessions or compromises to appeal to more people, as evidenced by the slow-building, nine-minute album opener, "Come Out, Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone."

"It's not a concern, not really," Dahl says of breaking the American market. "We want to be big, but not really, really big."We don't want paparazzi at our door. As long as we're making good music, it doesn't matter if there's a scene or not."