By Monk
Despite their rather anomalous name, this is a relatively youthful Swedish quartet whose initial storyline could echo one of one of those stupid straight-to-TV ‘B’ movies that piggybacked the success of the likes of ‘School Of Rock’, in that they are a bunch of high school friends who came together for a one-off gig but have stuck together ever since, releasing two albums and now this new five-track EP.
Opener ‘When The Levee Breaks’ is not a cover of the 50+ year-old Led Zeppelin but an exuberant slice of glunky power pop built on a huge melody, neatly crunchy riffs, a solid ‘banger of a rhythm and overtopped by Olle Westlund’s high end vocals, which both complement and counterpoint the slightly heavier tone of the underlying music.
‘Remember Me’ is a fairly archetypal upbeat indie-pop meets hair metal/sleaze rock style power ballad, complete with an earworm chorus and jangly guitar riff which leads into a second half which surprisingly mixes upbeat enthusiasm with a more retrospective lyrical content. ‘Holy Ghosts’ is another slice of catchy power pop, reversely starting off in more respective mode with a mournful opening line before extrapolating itself into a powerful and inciteful exemplar of the genre at its most eloquent.
‘Charade’ weirdly reminds me of The Only Ones, with its staccato riff, incessant beat and Westlund’s expressively effusive vocal, which bleeds heartbreak from his every breath.
But all of this is only a precursor for the EP’s titanic closing track, ‘All Those Yesterdays’, which builds from a deceptively soothing vocal-over-piano intro into a swirling whirlwind of post-punk noise that is both moribund and joyous, encircling you like a tornado, sucking you into mayhemic chaos before dumping you back on the ground asking “what the fuck just happened?”. A brilliant of how you can take a song, twist it in on itself and bring it back to its origin, all in five glorious minutes.
- ‘Out Of The Red‘ is out now.
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