It’s a road-movie of a record that Danish singers and songwriters DICTE + HEMPLER have put on the street. The title track calls for a tightening of the seat belt which, in combination with the music’s palpable rock’n’roll elements, offers a promising introduction on a journey with two soloists who have created an album that hypnotizes.
Since 2010, DICTE + HEMPLER have sold out Danish venues for an annual concert series called “The Dark & Stormy Sessions,” where they are traditionally backed by guitarist Mika Vandborg. In 2012, it crystalized into a live release from a concert in Copenhagen, but “Uppers” is their first true studio album, and a tale of two souls who found common ground in taste and authenticity. It lulls-in a mood of smoke and reckless abandon, with road signs pointing to Nashville and Memphis passing by, as we move, transported by Vandborg’s yearning guitars, on an album of songs with sterling stories that reverberate in a musical space where sparks fly.
And oh, how they fly. But also with some classic, blue song-writing that is given the opportunity to stand strong on its own, intimately and sensitively presented. Both voices offer the full spectrum, from whispers to the grandiose, and both are one with the songs and shared expressive form, which feels like vibration in bittersweet blues tones that tease and please and will not leave one alone.
This allows us into Dicte’s vocal delivery, that now, more than ever, has the vibrato of a saxophone. UPPERS was recorded in Kæv Studio, with Kæv Gliemann behind the console, and DICTE + HEMPLER are in agreement that with the new album, they have become one. Together, they have created a common language that has a dazzling timelessness. A form of expression that is loving and alluring, carried by a collection of carefully selected songs, including those from Claus Hempler’s great inventory of unpublished, captivating music. Music that bursts with stories that are the be all end all for them both.
Claus Hempler is a rare gem. Often labeled a “crooner” since having delivered the elegant “Charm School For Popsingers” just before the turn of the millennium, where the singer from Fielfraz showed the moves that made him Denmark’s leading man of delivering songs with style on stage. As was the case with Leonard Cohen’s tribute album, “På Danske Læber (on Danish Lips),” where Hempler’s declaratory version of “Everybody Knows” was an indisputable highlight. A rendition that created hunger for more. The self-titled “Hempler” album from 2005 was a return to the roots of classic rock’n’roll (not unlike Fielfraz), and the album brought him the Steppenwolf (Music Critics’) Prize in the Best Vocalist category, an award he also received at that year’s Danish Music Awards. Hempler continues to receive top billing in connection with DR’s new television drama series, “Herrens Veje” (The Way of the Lord), where he sings the theme song.
Dicte Vestergaard Madsen made her triumphant return to the forefront of Danish music in the Spring of 2016, when her first album in five years, “Perfume,” was lauded as a revival of the pure pop form that took subjects like love, resignation, and the role of a divorced mother of teenage children, and displayed them honestly, delivering them straight to the heart of the listener. Two of the songs on the record, “All I Want Is You” and “Stronger,” are among the biggest hits of her career. We have known Dicte since her breakthrough with “Her Personal Pain,” where she mastered a host of genres, from pop to soul to blues to jazz, and as her fairy-tale-yet-down-to-earth charisma introduced the Danes to a voice they took to gladly, and in droves. Dicte has a faithful and expanding fan base, and her acclaimed 2012 appearances on TV2’s star-studded program “Toppen af Poppen” brought her to a growing audience, where her successful version of rapper Johnson’s “Teriyaki” is regarded as an unforgettable moment in the series. Just another example of Dicte demonstrating her superior ability to take a hit and make it even greater.
