Country: Sweden
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: debut
Language: Swedish
Genre: Maximalist pop
At the beginning of the century, a whole slew of bands turned up using Bruce Springsteen as their jump off point, but making two important corrections: ‘Born in the USA’ is fine but what’s with the minimalism, can’t he get a couple more people in the band? And why can’t he be obsessed with 80s UK indie instead of rock’n’roll? The new Springteenian tradition is often dated back to Arcade Fire, but this guy was there first, and there’s no other way to put it, in contrast to those other ‘artists’, he’s good.
Because I was checking out all these albums on a budget, most of my copies are secondhand (or virtual), and the first track – Hellstrom’s Scandinavian superhit which started his career, and apparently his classic – is unplayable. No matter, the other nine songs are enough to convince me. This is a sugar rush of peaks, very high valleys which are really mountains too and peaks again. It’s kinda built to perform shock therapy on an audience as jaded with mass media as we’ve all become, but it works in the great tradition of pop, using whatever means necessary to make a lot of people feel the same thing at the same time. There is not a bad song on this album, and –to coin a cliché- if it was in English, some of these songs would have been hits all over the world.
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