Artist: Bingo Crowd
Title: Manners
Format: LP, CD, Digital
Label: Crispin Glover Records
Distribution: Stickman Records
Genre: Synth Rock
Release Date: 12/09/2025
The first thing to know about Bingo Crowd is that this is a band who do things intheir own time. Which doesn’t always correspond to the Julian calendar tha tmost of us rely on for our perspectives, and which tells us it’s been 17 years since their debut album Sinecure came out. Let’s just call the decision-making process within Bingo Crowd “deliberate” and leave it at that – this is a band that, having abandoned their original moniker Bitch Cassidy, but retaining an affection for the initials B.C., spent several years – years! – deciding on a new name.
Suffice it to say, Bingo Crowd is not like most bands. “The overall sound reminded me of the early Mute/Factory Records records that I loved and grew up on,” says Moulder of his decision to get involved, despite the constant demands made on his time by acts like Nine Inch Nails, Interpol and Queens of the Stone Age. “But,” he adds, “they added their own thing that made it current and I like that.”
“Current” does a lot of work in this particular sentence, given Bingo Crowd’s reluctance to engage with conventional notions of chronological time. The references to Mute and Factory might also induce chuckles within the band itself, as they were blissfully ignorant of the Manchester scene until well into adulthood, if not middle age.
The three men that make up Bingo Crowd = Andreas Elvenes, Svein Segtnan & Eivind Brønstad, grew up deep in the woods of Snåsa, a small community in one of the most sparsely populated areas of Norway, where the local economy inevitably centers on logging and forestry. Growing up in the pre digital age, popular music mainly found its way here through mix-tape cassettes played at the local railroad café – and the Mute/ Factory Records phenomenon Moulder refers to, never made it this far off the beaten path.
Instead, what we now know as Bingo Crowd began life as a hard and heavy Norwegian Metal trio built on massive guitar riffs, which is what rock music meant in Snåsa back then. All well and good, until guitarist Svein Segtnan happened to hear a piece of electronic music by Brian Eno, and grew intrigued enough to acquire a analog synthesizer. Entirely unfamiliar with the synth-centric pop music of the 1980s, Bingo Crowd proceeded to create a parallell musical universe of their own. Marching to their own beat, they eventually recorded a single, which became the very first release on Crispin Glover Records back in 2006. (After an inevitable delay, partly due to their inability to decide on a name, thus settling into a career-defining pattern.) (Also worth noting is the fact that Crispin Glover Records was started in order to put out music by Bingo Crowd. In other words, this is rather personal to us.)
The band themselves have on occasion described their music as “depressive disco”, which seems rather insufficient and flippant to our ears. The songs on Manners invoke a far more nuanced and splendiferous range of emotions, although a baseline of vague anxiety seems ever present. A promotor in Iceland once called it “Nügoth”, and certainly Bingo Crowd should sound appropriate in any setting that’s familiar with umlauts. Or, as Moulder puts it, “There is a darkness to the music that drew me in.” (Moulder, noted for his decades-long contributions to Trent Reznor’s catalogue, knows a thing or two about darkness.)
Tempting as it is to employ fancy academic and philosophical concepts in foreign languages – “Sui generis”, “Ding an sich” and such – in an attempt to convey the rich, moody mysteries of Manners, it probably doesn’t make more sense than trying to figure out the equally mysterious decision- making process behind some of the song titles herein. (We’ll let you figure out what “Litjtaltj” might mean on your own. Go ahead – we dare you.)
Regardless, somewhere within the Bingo Crowd head/space continuum, time and decisions have yielded exquisitely crafted music, as deliberate as it is surprising. Tension builds and is released, majestic choruses erupt – seemingly out of nowhere – while hypnotic loops abound, and intricate melodies soar and swirl before your ears and eyes. And it all seems to unfold with what the band itself refers to as “the logic of dreams”. Which is as logical and predictable as Bingo Crowd is ever going to get.
Tracklist
01. Observatory
02. Voloop
03. Priority Mail
04. Nitro My Shield
05. Mapmaker’s Dream
06. Litljtatlj
07. Nature Guy
08. Weekend House
09. Pyramide
10. Portamento Mori
Links
Bandcamp: https://bingocrowd.bandcamp.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bingo.crowd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Bingo-Crowd-61559649422788/
Label: https://www.cgrshop.no
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