This month, Helsingborg, Sweden’s The Sounds return with Crossing the Rubicon, their third album of synth-accented glam-pop.
Awash in piss and vinegar, the record picks up right where 2006’s Dying To Say This To You left off, with the band plowing its way through athletic, menacing rock anthems with sweaty dexterity under the guidance of sassy siren Maja Ivarsson’s raspy yelps.
Team Last Call chatted up drummer Fredrik Nilsson about the new album and the Swedish cockiness curve.
Team Last Call: What were your goals musically with this album?
Fredrik Nilsson: We just wanted to make an album that was totally the band’s [idea] of what our music is, and not someone else’s. We did all the demos ourselves in our own studio in Sweden, and then we decided to not have any labels whatsoever involved in the process of making the album. The five members of the band, we financed everything, all the album costs. We got rid of pretty much all of our old labels in various territories. Right now we’re licensing the album here in the States to a record label, but The Sounds own the album.
TLC: Going into your third album, do you feel satisfied with where you are as a band?
FN: The only thing I really want now is for the album to be out. It’s much more fun to play the new songs when people actually know them. I’m sure by the end of the tour cycle I’ll be really sick of the songs and just want to write a new album, but that’s the way it goes.
TLC: You’ve always been plagued with comparisons to Blondie. I always thought it was unfair, until I heard “Beatbox” from the new album, which sounds exactly like “Rapture” …
FN: Blondie is a great band, but I don’t think any of us is a Blondie fan or has any Blondie records or anything like that. To me, that’s just a lazy thing that journalists do, is to compare a band to something else that already exists. I think that’s a really easy and cheap way. To me, that’s really boring. It has more to do with the look of the band than the sound of our band.
TLC: You also get grouped in with the whole ’80s revival scene.
FN: We all grew up in the ’80s, so it factors in somewhere, but we never set out to have an ’80s sound. It surprises me sometimes. As soon as there are keyboards on the tracks, they all refer to the ’80s, like that was the only decade that had keyboards.
TLC: You’ve got a reputation for being a really cocky band.
FN: I don’t think we ever considered ourselves to be a cocky band. We’re a self-confident band.
TLC: I meant cocky for Swedish people.
FN: They don’t like it in Sweden when you’re too self-confident. They have this saying – Jantelagen, it’s called in Swedish – that basically says you’re not better than anyone else. Everybody’s the same. Don’t think you’re better than anyone else, because you’re not. We don’t think we’re better than anyone else. We just think we’re really good.
TLC: People have accused you of not being Swedish enough. Is there such a thing as being too Swedish?
FN: Yeah, there is. I think you can only explain it to other Swedish people. But yeah, you can definitely be too Swedish. There’s a lot of people like that in Sweden. They’re very, I don’t want to say self-centered, but everything that happens in Sweden is really important and everything that happens outside of Sweden is not so important.
TLC: A lot of Americans know your music best from the GEICO caveman commercial. Is that good or bad?
FN: All ways of coming across our band to us is a good way. But if you see one song in a TV commercial and then you go and see the band, you might be in for a real surprise.
TLC: Maja is always making the Hottest Women in Rock lists. What’s it like for the rest of you to see stuff like that?
FN: All publicity like that is going to rub off on the band. It kind of makes me wonder where all the Hottest Drummers lists are, and why I’m not on them.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
IKEA. ABBA. Fish. Meatballs. Sweden, you just give and give.
From The Cardigans to The Sounds to Refused to Peter Bjorn And John, Swedish musical exports have almost always been worth taking a chk-a-chance on (Ace of Base notwithstanding). That list expands in 2009 with the release of the self-titled EP from Love In October, a Chicago band led by brothers and Swedish expatriates Erik and Kent Widman.
Stuck somewhere in the quirk-rock spectrum between Dinosaur Jr. and Modest Mouse, the band flip-flops between blissfully fuzzed-out rockers and mellow dance tunes, anxious yelps and hushed croons, biting off Built to Spill’s manic guitar heroics one minute and the Get-Up Kids’ keys-accented power pop the next. (GUK drummer Rob Pope co-produced the band’s 2008 full-length.) Depending on the song, Love In October’s music comes across as either playfully dramatic or dramatically playful; either way, it’s Swedish through and through.
“I would say 75 percent of our sound comes from Swedish influences,” says Erik, the band’s singer, guitarist and pianist, who emigrated from Sweden to Michigan in 2000 for college. “I also had the privilege to have a really good music teacher who taught me a lot of Swedish folk music theory. Now I’m trying to take what I learned a long time ago and recall that, but then put it into a rock and roll context.”
The Love In October EP (released May 26) is the band’s third release since the brothers Widman reunited in Minneapolis in 2006. It’s the first, however, since the band stumbled upon its current sound. Previous records were more pedestrian in their approach, with a more obvious, swing-for-the-fences appeal that earned LiO dubious comparisons to Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and bands of that ilk.
“I don’t even know why we were doing it,” Erik shrugs. “We didn’t enjoy listening to our own music, so it was kind of like, ‘What the fuck are we doing? Let’s actually write something that A) we want to play, and B) we want to listen to.’ I think we kind of found our own path to go down.”
The move towards a more natural and raw sound has benefited Love In October in more ways than one. Aside from churning out a praiseworthy EP that nestles nicely on your iPod between Lou Reed and Lovedrug, the band has made major strides into the mainstream market with the placement of its song “Like Nothing Ever Happened” in national TV and radio advertisements for Shoe Carnival. With one catchy, quirky pop song, Love In October has more or less eliminated the necessity for the record deal it was chasing so earnestly in its first few years. The irony is almost too big to swallow.
“Now we write music to please ourselves,” Erik says, “and if anybody likes it, that’s good.”
Try less, get more. Sweden, I don’t know how you do it.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
