My favourite Labrador artists - The Radio Dept. - are back at it with a new EP: Freddie and the Trojan Horse, and an upcoming new album (titled Clinging to a Scheme) due September 10. At least, this EP was freshly released when I first started to write this post… damned summer apathy.
These Swedish sweethearts slapped us with sincere shoegaze (holy alliteration!) with their 2003 album Lesser Matters. This delicate collection of melodic pop-rock reminiscent of The Field Mice on horse tranquilizers was praised as being not only an achievement in the genre, but a gem of the year. I had a really hard time only choosing one to post. Get this album, I mean it!
Following with Pet Grief in 2006, the boys (as they were now lacking their female vocalist) changed the direction of their music by introducing a drum machine and upping the focus on 80s-toned synth. They still retained their characteristic fuzziness but I think it lacked the charm of their debut disk. Despite this, “The Worst Taste In Music” is seductive for championing the indie-sentiment that a true love could abandon their beau based on their sub-par music preferences. Ah, the indie-kid superiority complex. So cute.
“Freddie and the Trojan Horse” introduced some heavy piano and followed up on the sad-sack mentality, but I’m still loving it. I tossed the new one on here for your perusal, as well as some old favourites and the video to the EP-only “Pulling Our Weight”. As a sidenote, I think that clouds are completely appropriate for a dreampop vid.
My Swedish friends are hating me for butchering the Swedish language with my babblefish translated titles - so this one goes out to them.
I first wrote about Lykke Li back in December. At the time, she was pretty much the bees-knees in the Swedish music scene. After having only released one single (”Little Bit“) people were hailing the 21 year-old as the next Robyn. Just a few months later, and konichiwa bitches, Lykke dropped her debut LP Youth Novels. The LP was produced by Björn Yttling (of PB&J fame) and Lasse Mårtén (who after producing Kelly Clarkson singles, seems to have gotten frustrated and turned to the likes of Lykke and the Shout Out Louds to get back his street-cred). The album is a fairly solid debut for Li. If I was Pitchfork, I’d probably give it a 7.4/10.
A couple of my favorite tracks are:
1. The Jens Lekman-ish “My“, a dreamy pop number which makes me want to run through the Swedish low-land wheat fields.
3. “This Trumpet in My Head” is one of two spoken-word songs on the album. It’s got a sweet classical guitar intro, a great little trumpet section, which Lykke claims she just “can’t get out of her head”. It kind of reminds me of the first time I listened to Danielson’s “Did I Step on Your Trumpet?”.
In the mean time, Lykke’s also gotten to be quite tight with her fellow Scandanvians, performing a medley of songs including (her own) “Little Bit”, “Until We Bleed” and “With Every Heartbeat” with Kleerup and Robyn at the P3 Guld Award
[Update: That video got deleted. So here’s a sweet video of Lykke busking with her homies in Sweden]
Another sweet video, featuring her new-found homies, is her acoustic rendition of “I’m Good, I’m Gone” (Lykke’s latest single) with guests: Robyn, Adam & Bebban (of the Shout Out Louds), Daniel (of The Concretes), Lars Laakso and Mikael Hjalmar:
With only three songs recorded and released, a lot of people are telling me that it’s too soon for me to put my money on Lykke Li as Sweden’s next sensation. To those people I say, read this couplet from her single “Little Bit”:
It’s for you I keep my legs apart,
I forget about my tainted heart.
Any girl that’s capable of writing something so dirtay, and yet so coy and tender, has my vote and love. Add to the mix that she’s Swedish, and I’m smitten.
Lykke Li has already generated a fair amount of buzz in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia. Now 21 years young, she spent her childhood summers growing up in the mountains of Portugal, and winters traveling with her mother through India, owning only one album - a cassette of Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. She eventually got her hands on a few more albums and in September of this year, with the release of her first EP (”Little Bit”), Lykke’s quickly gotten “a buzz bigger than insects in Texas” (for reference, I try to make one Kanye shout-out in every post I write, even if it has to sound as forced and contrived as this last one sounded). After playing a few shows with Peter, Bjorn and John, over the past few months, Björn Yttling decided to executive produce her full length debut, to be released in early 2008. The album will also feature work from fellow Scandinavians Röyksopp and Kleerup (as much as I like Kanye reference, I also love a chance to use a good umlaut - look out for these in future posts as well).
So for those of you who aren’t just sold on the fact that she’s hot and Swedish, there’s also something to be said for her music. In the same way that fellow Swede, Jens Lekman, makes the act of self-administering an asthma inhaler soft and romantic (You pick up your asthma inhaler and put it against your lips/oh those lips i’ve loved/ they’re so red and soft/ i’m so sorry i couldn’t love you enough!) Lykke’s song writing achieves the same end, by inviting the listener into her world, and taking them through what feels like a very natural and intimate thought process.
“Little Bit” is a song about how hard she finds it to tell the guy she’s seeing that she loves him; partially because she doesn’t know if she does, and partially because she’s scared he won’t say it back to her. She starts out the song boldly saying “Hands down, I’m too proud for love” - unfortunately, I hear that one every time I try to close a deal at Alfie’s. But by the end of the song, it seems very natural when she says “I will do it, push the button, pull the trigger, climb a mountain, jump off a cliff ’cause you’re my baby / I love you love you a little bit.” All that emotion (or as R. Kelly would call it “real talk”) set to an infectious beat, makes this song a must have. The video is pretty cool too, directed by Mattias Montero.
Maybe it’s just me, but I thought that music and violence don’t really correlate. Both are a release, music being a far more creative and constructive form than violence. Sure, there have been instances of violence in pop music: Pete Townsend annihilating his guitar on stage, Sid Vicious spitting on his audience, Joy Division rejecting their skinhead fans, mosh pits in American hardcore concerts of the early 80s, et cetera. But it’s like Dee Snider said, it’s better to throw your fists in the air than in someone else’s face.
The last place I would ever think to see violence glorified (or accusations of violence being glorified) is in a retro-minded pop group from Sweden. This is the buzz on The Tough Alliance (Website / MySpace): they carry baseball bats and swing them a lot. But despite my pacifist ways, I just don’t care. The songs are good. Most likely it’s just an exaggeration of a clever stage prop, and either way they live in Sweden, which is a long ways away. It sounds like a hilarious live show, especially once you hear what they sound like. With definite new wave influences, I would say the closest sound is Wham!. That’s right! George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. So if you’re like me and have a new wave guilty pleasures playlist on your iTunes, then blast it loud and proud. “Too-Ry-Aye!”…”Hush hush, eye to eye!”…”I wanted to be with you alone…”
”First Class Riot” from A New Chance (MP3 Download)
