Plowing Into the Field of Love

While the urgency of You're Nothing is missed, this more distraught-sounding version of the band is plenty captivating. [No. 115, p.57]

It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace.

Iceage are therefore seemingly unafraid of experimentation and to play with sounds and instrumentation they discover in the process of creation. And Plowing Into The Field Of Love, acts as an extraordinary documentation of this process, where influence and intuition have come together in perfect union, allowing Iceage to expand without losing their core. In turn, they have matured to find catharsis in texture, dynamics and control rather than fast-paced adolescent aggression.

Plowing Into the Field of Love is a great record which only has one song on it that really sounds like the Gun Club, or like anything you would want to play over the trailer of The Hateful Eight.

The real leap here, though, is one of songwriting. [Dec 2014, p.77]

Overall, Plowing is an artistic, unique and rather enjoyable step few probably expected Iceage to make, and quite easily the band's best album yet.

Iceage cleans up its sound, slows down the tempos and adds instruments like strings and piano on this third full length, but none of this takes the rawness out.

If Plowing Into the Field of Love is meant to convey anything, it’s the otherworldly passion of a world without control and without truth.

There’s something so deliciously wrong about hearing these usually graceful instruments and sounds turned wicked in Iceage’s hands, like being read a nursery rhyme by Jack The Ripper.

If you ask me, this is the most punk thing Iceage could've done at this point--and arguably the best thing they've done, period.

From what they’ve cooked up here, it’s hard to imagine hearing a record this immersive and mesmerising from anyone else.

As the album unfolds, one thing becomes clear: Iceage has succeeded in creating a bleak world all their own, a world not entirely indebted to their post-punk forebears, and one filled with the contradictions of youth.

Iceage are showing more growing pains here than those acts did, but Plowing into the Field is still a big step for forward for Iceage, and a generally interesting listen, even if it's a bit much to take all in one sitting.

Their superb third album [is] a classic case of punk wolfboys who discover girls and lose their religion.

This is steps towards a new sound for Iceage, if not a potentially newish sound in an otherwise very well-worn genre, and you have to admit the band for what they pull off.

Iceage have done a fair bit of reinvention on Plowing Into the Field of Love, but if the sound is less brutal, it's no less challenging, and emotionally this hits as hard as anything they've released to date.

Allusions to the Birthday Party abound as Iceage thunders across the high desert of the soul, and you can almost smell the toxic fragrance of cheap liquor and stale cigarettes on Elias Bender Rønnenfelt's tortured, breathy vocal as he slurs his way through half-cocked entreaties that would make Stanley Kowalski take pause.

In otherwise safe-as-houses 2014, it’s refreshing to find a young band channelling such influences into such a gloriously untamed row.

Full marks for envelope-pushing, but this third album is very much an acquired taste. [Dec 2014, p.110]