If you haven’t experienced Egon Schiele’s work, I highly suggest you stop and go do that before moving on here.
Cool weirdo stuff, right? A reproduction of a self-portrait by Schiele that hung on Andreas W. H. Lindvåg’s bedroom wall was the inspiration behind Egon. The song is more revealing of The Slow Painters’ vocalist and songwriter than of Schiele himself. It’s jangly indie-rock with a tincture of country as they paint a picture of a pompous young man seeing himself through the self-depiction of another. Slow stutter percussion and stretched sharp notes are propelled as Lindvåg howls like flying shards of glass.
The Slow Painters came of age in the dodgy end of brit-pop, but have since ventured deep into The Great Indie Rock Songbook. Their self-titled debut album is a testament to lost opportunities and outsider pop songs too good to let go.
Berlin, Glasgow, fear of studios, a lo-fi band called The Uptights, a parrot, and a stolen computer all played a part in why it took the band this long. But in the autumn of 2017, they finally knocked on the door of Sjur Lyseid’s (The Little Hands of Asphalt) recording studio in Oslo.