Month: March 2006

The sprawling ragbag democracy and fascination for obscure vocal groups of the nineteen-sixties that defined this Swedish eight-piece’s first album appears to have been supplanted by a far clearer commercial perspective and the election of Victoria Bergsman as leader, subtle though it is. Out go the garage references, the ragbag, crazy time signatures, out goes the Velvet Underground, The Ronettes, Phil Spector, the tatty drum sounds and Mazzy Star and out too goes the band’s first producer, Jari Haapalainen, presumably Continue Reading

It’s a thin line between the cool and the ridiculous. As Eddie Izzard explains it – a guy leaning against a wall with a cocktail stick between his teeth is cool, whereas a guy leaning against a wall with two cocktail sticks between his teeth is ridiculous. Similarly in music the divide between the chic and the shocking – Ziggy and Alvin Stardust – is as thin as heavily applied eye-liner. However, and here’s the rub kids, this line is Continue Reading

We want to like Morning Runner, really we do. If you have any kind of instinctive yearning for maudlin chest-beating gravel-dashed power-pop, the sort with lungs like massive steam-driven bellows you could probably spot from space on a cloudless night, you will too. Their first couple of singles didn’t hang about, like a grand piano coming in for a bear-hug as the world blinked by in the background. Reassuring, warm, familiar, but not without the feeling that things could hit Continue Reading