The Foreign Resort at the Red Party at Mercury Lounge

Mikkel Jakobsen

Vocalist/guitarist Mikkel Jakobsen, bassist Steffan Petersen, and drummer Morten Hansen had played in death metal bands in their native cities in Denmark when they came together as the Foreign Resort in Copenhagen in 2009 to play something different. Influenced by noise rock and shoegaze, their experiments in music unconsciously led them to gothic, dark wave and post-punk sounds. The band name was inspired by Jacobsen's two-and-a-half- year residence in Israel, which he saw as his foreign resort. The Foreign Resort's sixth studio album, Outnumbered, was released on April 5, 2019.

The Foreign Resort headlined tonight at the 12th anniversary of the Red Party at Mercury Lounge, a night that also included a performance by Astari Night. The Foreign Resort provided a hard, throbbing, angular anchor to the monthly gathering of goths and post punks. As a power trio, much of the music was driven by guitars (Jakobsen and Petersen occasionally switched instruments) and their chorus, reverb, delay and fuzz effects. Several times, pre-recorded sounds seemed to be surreptitiously added to thicken the band's wall of sound. The band's rapid-pulsing rhythms were almost hypnotic in that, rather than building to a crescendo, the repetition of simple waves built tension and explosive release. The music seldom climbed scales except when Jakobsen's melancholic vocal modulation framed a song. This created an overall dark, swirling effect that was as menacing as it was mysterious. The Foreign Resort's performance was shadowy, edgy, and riveting.