Someone not Damo Somewhere like Iceland

Last week I heard this song on Radio 2 that could be my current most favourite song, if I could hear it more than once more. It sounds uncannily like Damien Rice, both vocally and musically. At first I thought a miracle had happened and Damo had finally released a new song or (dare I say lest it bring on the apocalypse?) album. So I scrounged around Damo’s websites to see if there truly was something new. Of course not. For days I looked over Radio 2’s playlist, but nothing matched this song (the only words I remembered were “someone somewhere” and what may be “maybe they’re there”) until Tuesday when I saw it listed. It is indeed called “Someone Somewhere” and is by an Icelandic band named Dikta which looks like a dyslexic form of a Bears coach. My handy Icelandic dictionary tells me the word diktur means fiction. No idea if that’s what this band was going for.

The band has been together since 1999. In 2002 they released their first CD titled Andartak, which may mean Just a Moment. I’d heard them, but dismissed them as wanna be alt grungers whose music was far superior to their lead singer’s voice. Either he’s improved or they’ve switched singers or they’ve spent the past three years studying Damien Rice or this song is an anomaly akin to Wilco’s “Hummingbird.” Whichever, the song is great. While waiting for a second CD which they’re hoping to release this fall, I’ve given their first another try and, despite the gravelly vocal shortcomings, it has a lot of merit. Described in the press as: diverse, dynamic and “an interesting hybrid of well arranged emo-spiced new wave rock.” There are some mp3s hanging around, including another new song titled Chloe which we can only hope is about 24’s Miss O’Brien.