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Various Artists Thank You For The Music
Licking Fingers
Article
written by Ged M
Jun 23, 2008.
The first song - and revealingly the only one in Swedish, ‘Svensktalande Bättre Folk’ by Anna Järvinen - is inspired by the Swedes’ disdain for their neighbouring Finns for their lack of an independent, imperial past. It’s an odd thought that the Swedes had this martial history – now they’re setting about conquering the world musically, as the sleeve notes have it, “in a sensible Swedish social-democratic kind of way”. The Concretes’ imprint Licking Fingers has collected 21 examples of these would-be conquerors. There’s a mixture of the known and unknown, the potentially huge and the resolutely indie (though in Swedish terms ‘pop’ and ‘indiepop’ have few distinctions) and if there are common themes, they’re a melodic poppiness, a melancholy sparkle and an unselfconscious 80s obsession.
Lykke Li is soon to be huge with her Madonna obsession but here she’s elegantly introverted while the sweeping strings and Cure-ish yelps of the Shout Out Louds’ ‘South America’ sound bound for glory. El Perro Del Mar has a charming childlike naïve view on ‘Glory to the World’ while Peter Moren (flying solo after Peter, Bjorn and John) starts ‘Social Conscience’ like a Swedish Elliott Smith with his story of life as an antisocial supply teacher but explodes into a series of choruses that mere mortals would kill to compose. The Radio Dept trail their forthcoming album with ‘Freddie and the Trojan Horse’, which has the same glacial swooshy-pop brilliance as previous albums. I didn’t know Wildbirds and Peacedrums but their intriguing ‘Liar Lion’ has a jazzy percussion and skeletal keyboard sound, with Mariam’s voice carrying the melody. There are also great tracks from Jens Lekman, Loney Dear, Those Dancing Days, First Floor Power and The Tiny (a Scandi-Tori Amos), although Pacific! are symptomatic of a couple of bands who are too obviously camped out in late 80s electro-pop land while Nicolai Dunger is trying a bit too hard to be Jeff Buckley.
For a small nation (9m people), Sweden has produced a disproportionate amount of exportable pop from Abba and the Hives to Jose Gonzales and Robyn and Thank You for the Music – like last year’s Labrador 100 compilation - shows that it seems to be an inexhaustible resource. So all that’s left to say is: thank you.
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