Eggs

Oh No Ono is an experimental pop quintet from the tiny Danish town of Aalborg. Their music, intricate and otherworldly, defies conventions and expectations (and sometimes gravity). The ten dense, hypertextured sour-sweet-sad opuses found on their US debut album, Eggs, are truly breathtaking to behold; the band creates bewitching pop symphonies that unfold themselves more with each successive listen. To record the album, the band locked themselves away in a small country house on the Danish isle of Mon for nine months. And yet Eggs is the anything but claustrophobic; reaching beyond traditional guitar/bass/drum textures, the band weaves myriad environmental sounds, samples, and nonstandard instrumentation into the mix. The sound of bird flocks taking flight are followed by woodwind players. Percussion is played on a water-filled tub. Elephants are heard, being elephants. A massive choir of Oh No Ono's friends sing along with the organ in a 300-year-old church.

Which is not to say the band spent all nine months cuddling trees and Pinking their Floyds. Like their contemporaries Animal Collective, the propulsive yet fundamentally beautiful pop Oh No Ono creates ties together all the ear games. Eggs' vivacious, even lusty approach to songcraft is the trademark of a band determined to approach pop music via the hard road, without ever losing track of the fact that they are creating pop music. From the shimmering textures of 'The Wave Ballet' to the operatic splendor of 'Icicles,' from the cacophonic underwater pop of 'Eleanor Speaks' to the falsetto singalongs of 'The Tea Party,' this is a band whose command of melody is superlative, and whose ability to channel and transform their myriad musical influences into something genuinely unique and entrancing is thrilling.