HAIL SWEDONIA

Just two today, but they're both Swedish and they're both killer.

The Horror The Horror, "Ipanema" - I suppose ten months into the year is as good a point as any to start waking up to all the great music I passed over earlier in the year, although I'd probably be a few weeks off from properly pondering that supposition if it hadn't been for the timely and world-consuming re-emergence of the self-titled debut album by Sweden's The Horror The Horror. It isn't even that I'd had the album on ignore - as someone who attempts to stay as true to Piccadilly as possible, putting THTH on ignore back in February or March would have been roughly as possible as a rap fan totally ignoring Cam'ron over the summer - but merely that it hadn't taken over my life; I may have been putting "Twice In A Lifetime" on every other mix CD I was making, but the album as a whole never really installed the type of fixation that I find increasingly necessary in order to get me up off my ass, sit my ass back down, and give the album an actual fair shot, and frankly my memories of KaiserChiefsGate are a little too vivid for me to go forcing myself into a state of enthusiasm for any record these days regardless of its merits. It's an unfair rule, true, but it's an effective one - lord knows I have to think it was the only thing keeping me from losing my shit over that I'm From Barcelona record which, but for how oppressively irritating it turned out to be, would have been so far up my alley as to rent out space in my basement.

And anyway, as THTH seem to be bearing out in grand style seven months after the fact, the worthy albums always end up rising to the top anyway; sometimes they just aren't worthy in particularly spectacular fashions. The Horror The Horror, by my estimation, isn't especially imaginative or bold, but most damning of all has to be the way in which it really isn't all that "cool"; as much as I love the Strokes' first album (and I love it enough to call it one of my five or ten favorite records, like, ever, so for once I ain't just whistlin' Dixie), even I have to admit that the market for albums peddling Is This It's brand of heavily mediated slacker chic has been oversaturated since back when people were unsatirically suggesting that we build a giant middle finger facing Mecca on the site of the World Trade Center. It's not even a question of popular culture moving on; all those telegraphed guitar lines and smirking cymbals would have sounded instantly dated even before the emergence of Interpol (seriously, raise your hand if you had Turn Out Your Bright Lights tagged as one of the two or three most influential releases of the decade back when it came out), let alone in Two Thousand Fucking Six. And given how central the coolness factor is to the appeal of albums of that school, you'd think that the actual music would have to be a whole lot more spectacular than the songs on The Horror The Horror to compensate for coolness' absence - hell, it's been such a bear market on that kind of cool that even the Strokes haven't been able to continue capitalizing on their intial investment.

And yet though you might think that, you'd be remarkably wrong. People (i.e. "I") often forget that even though %99.999999bar of the planet's coolness may be artificial in nature, at least some of it's got to be genuine (or else there's nothing to copy). Consequently, I think one of the biggest reasons why I like The Horror The Horror so much is the way it throws light on one of the single most critical - and yet also most under-discussed - aspects of what makes the Strokes, and therefore modern rock, worth listening to in the first place, namely the way their best stuff sounds like it just sorta happened. Anybody, after all, can come up with a great rock song (ah, the Win Butler Corrollary), but it usually takes time and effort and a willingness to risk accidentally a shitty Meatloaf-esque track to do so; it's far harder to find a band that just kinda shows up and picks their instruments up and rocks the fuck out and puts their shit down and then gets back to doing whatever they were doing before. And though I'm one billion percent confident that The Horror The Horror worked at least as hard on the songs on their record as the Strokes do on theirs (i.e. very very very very very), it's that dizzyingly oversimplified effect that gets passed down to me - that deadly combination of "Hey, I just found this killer guitar hook" with "Hey, I just found a really enjoyable way to beat the shit out of the drums" and "Hey, I bet I could have a shitload of fun inflecting this line into a mic" which seems to be the only reliable formula which produces songs as effortlessly indelible as "Ipanema".

It's also one of the more uniquely tidy propositions put before Me The Music Consumer; generally speaking, after all, I'm not interested in music I don't enjoy, and I'm certainly not interested in music I have to respect (unless of course I enjoy respecting the music, but let's not go swallowing our own tails just yet), so what better way to address me directly than to turn my perspective into a creative one? Granted, if your songs suck, you're basically setting yourself up for a lifetime of being the butt of my jokes, but it's not like The Horror The Horror really have anything to worry about here; the very first thing you hear in "Ipanema" is a guitar peeling off basically the exact riff the Strokes have been searching for since they realized they had to make a second album, and it's so satisfying that it practically obliviates every other exemplary characteristic present in the song, from those swaggering drums to the artful disaffected phlegmatism of Matthias Axelsson's vocals to, well, really everything else in the song. And that's what the whole album is like - capable of being utterly eclipsed by whichever component of it happens to be momentarily touching you where you pee, sometimes on a song-by-song basis, other times an element-by-element level, and occasionally (as in the case of the delivery of the word "callin'" on "Twice In A Lifetime", which was literally all it took to sell me on that song for the forseeable future) going even more microscopic than that. And true, sure it's not necessarily the most thrilling way to listen to a record, and of course I'd much rather music take aim at spiking the dopamine levels in my brain than giving me something upon which I can quietly subsist; I wouldn't be able to raise a single cogent response to any of these arguments. I am, however, saying that The Horror The Horror has less potential to wind up in the basement of my estimation with all those awful Bravery records, and with my track record, that counts for a whole hell of a lot. (Click here to buy The Horror The Horror from Amazon.co.uk)

Like Honey, "Airport" - I'm sure I must have lived through a time when I wasn't cannibalizing Stytzer's posts over at the unstoppable Hits In The Car for songs to stick in this space; what I can't imagine for the life of me is why, because the man simply has the knack for finding songs that sound like they've just been waiting around Musical Purgatory for the right moment to leap into my present day and start beating me half to death. I mean, it just seems incomprehensible that a song like "Airport", all melancholy and gorgeous and 90s-as-fuck'ed up in a way that I've only ever really seen Beulah pull off before, could somehow exist on this planet without me getting word, and yet I wasn't even aware of the song's existence until the second time Stytzer posted it. Just mindblowing.

Anyway - it's a fairly straightforward track, not the kind of thing that can really bear too much explication; I knew halfway through its opening bar that "Airport" was destined to end up here someday, but I can understand its indie classicism turning people off just as quickly, especially if even the coolness of a band like the Concretes or Sea Change-era Beck can't distract you from how nakedly referential the whole thing sounds. Frankly, though, I'm of the opinion that that's part of "Airport"'s appeal; as someone who didn't buy into %99 of the most charming records of the '90s as having even a shred of the power to charm that they subsequently found themselves afforded (q.v. the recent reevaluation of the career of Lisa Loeb), there's something immensely attractive about a record that basically just goes "Aw, c'mon - even I could do that song better!", partially because I like being reminded about how far I've come in terms of being able to appreciate otherwise objectionable stuff since the mid-90s, and partially because, uh, well, it's kinda really way way way better than the source material anyway (or at the very least answers the question "Just how good could the Cranberries have theoretically been if they didn't have the advantage of All Those Big-Ass Drums over all their C86-inspired peers?"). Thank god someone's on the case when it comes to all the music that sounds like this, then - clearly I'm remiss in my duties. (Click here to visit the webshop of Hybris, the label releasing the "Airport" EP, to buy it directly)