Cynic Guru
Reykjavik, IS
Rock / Alternative Rock / Alt-Pop-Rock-Prog Rock
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Bio
Roland Hartwell - lead singer, guitars and violins
Ricky Korn - bass
Oli Holm - drums
Einar Johannsson - bkg vocs and lead guitar
Cynic Guru is an American/Icelandic rock band based in Iceland, with label representation in Iceland, Japan and the UK.
About
Fat Northerner Records are proud to you offer you drugs,
the new single from Icelandic avant-pop superstars
Cynic Guru.
Led by multi-talented singer/songwriter/violinist Roland
Hartwell, a member of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra
who has played with Elvis Costello, Dr. Dre, Burt Bacharach
and Barry White amongst others, Cynic Guru are blazing a
trail in their homeland with their own unique brand of slightly
skewed, deceptively dark pop music.
Their forthcoming album, ‘Cynic Guru’, has already been a
huge smash back home, where it was released by Iceland’s
biggest record company to critical and commercial acclaim,
spawning several hit singles, including ‘Drugs’ which reached
number one in the Icelandic charts.
It’s not difficult to figure out why ‘Drugs’ was such a succes in
a country famed for it’s knack of making hugely accessible,
yet incredibly weird pop music. On the surface, Cynic Guru
are flaunting their obvious love for articulate pop like Tears for
Fears, Talk Talk and ‘Band on the Run’ era Wings, but beneath
the pretty McCartney-esque melodies and radio friendly
production, lurks the kind of experimental mischief that has
turned compatriots such as Bjork and Sigur Ros into figure-
heds of alternative music, as well as global superstars.
The mischief is there in the sounds Hartwell coaxes out of his
violin (veering from angelic to demonic) it’s there in his bands
schizophrenic leaps from pop to funk to metal to classical
(often in the same song) and most disconcertingly, in the
brilliantly bizarre lyrics of ‘Drugs’.
‘Drugs’ opens as a tale of typical youthful escapism, as a
group of friends ‘decide to try a new drug, cos the typical is
not enough’. However, soon enough, in Hartwell’s words,
‘something went wrong’. Quite what went wrong is unclear,
until the song reaches it’s gloriously harrowing peak and we
are informed of the fate of his friends...‘they say he jumped
out of the window, the other cooked his face in a pan,
another super-glued his eyes closed and I pulled all my teeth
out with my bare hands’, Hartwell goes on to remind us of his
own fate repeatedly, before inflicting similar torture on the
violin he was carressing so delicately only seconds before.
‘Drugs’ is released by Fat Northerner on 26th November
2007, whilst the debut album ‘Cynic Guru’ will be released on
28th Jan 2008.



Cynic Guru










