It’s been a while since the songwriter Pär Enqvist picked the lock and got into that room where all the lyrics and strangely obvious melodies lay in fermenting drifts, but the frenzy with which he is still carrying them out for us never ceases to surprise. We’re not talking about a whippersnapper here, yet there’s a sort of creative sparkle on record after record and “Utanför lagen” (Outside the law) is no exception.
“Maybe as if Springsteen and Steve Earle got into eating falukorv (typical swedish working-class grub), hanging down the pub at Bagarmossen (run-down suburb south of Stockholm), after a hard days work.” This is to be read at the homepage of Pär Enqvist Band and if you never listened to the music you might laugh indulgently at those pretensions but hell if it’s not a wrap-up making the rest of this text rather needless.
Raka rör (straight pipes, or something to that effect…) as the legendary scanian rocker Kal P Dal would have been content to conclude, still pensive as well as anguished at times.
Pär Enqvist doesn’t invent his music but fills it with himself so that after a while it feels like it was for him it was always looking…and what I’m maybe trying to say with this is that no matter how strong and unmistakable the roots we have still never seen this particular plant before. We know precisely what he’s been listening to and grown out of; still while we’re listening it’s as if he’s actually the original.
It’s so strong and coherent, and though the producer Max Lorentz (Ronander, Rickfors, Kim Larsen…) undoubtedly put his mark here we recognize ourselves. It’s a long yet too short journey through sorrow and lust, gloominess and confusion and sudden relieving grins, it’s hard and and relentless, nostalgic and delightful, it contains the whole range from tenderness and respect and honours to a contempt so dense that blood is drawn.
There are tunnel-visioned desperados and jailbirds and battered women and abandoned children and…reluctant pensioners and dogmatists and safety junkies and daredevils, shying dogs and arrogants and lovers gone astray – all of them ultimately of course looking for the same thing – some kind of a home.
The opening “Det här tåget går nu” (This train is leaving now), so bursting with bulldog spirit and never-say-die that you dont get your bearings straight til you’re already aboard, having left the station.
“Längtar efter dej” (Longing for you) is about lacking and wanting, as the title suggests, and “Belos” is a kind of rapidly sailing ballad about swapping one life for another.
“Även hjältar måste dö” (Even heroes must die) about getting stuck in self-sufficient defiance is a personal favourite with its poprocky rolling holding its ever-so slightly lecturing sternness.
“Dom som går” (Those who go) might with its snug rattle of widely disparate people with the very same dreams stand as a conclusion of the entire CD.
“Samma gamla misstag” (The same old mistake) – about running into the same wall over and over again, an almost but only almost resigned song about the impossible (?) togetherness, leading to “Det är för sent” (It’s too late) which supposedly is another variation on the same theme, i.e. a dirge over lost possibility but with an up-tempo beat that is looking ahead, refusing to give in more than temporarily to sentimentality.
During the three minutes and fourteen seconds that are called “Det var inte mitt fel” (It wasn’t my fault) we even have time to be scared; I cant actually recall a song as filled with contempt as this one. Which is of course fascinating as well – it is not often that our songwriters dare to open that door, more than ajar, possibly.
“Svårt att va människa ibland” (Hard to be human at times) is pc-rock or what to call it at its most effective, it`s honest and it bleeds, it’s sad and it’s furious, it’s Magnus Lindberg in the twentyfirst century.
In the astonishingly sensitive “Prygelland” (Land of flogging) a woman, for years half beaten to death, finally gets her impossible uncertain revenge, and music and lyrics have never been more symbiotic.
“Allting faller isär” (Everything falls apart) is yet another song about starting over, possibly the mainest of threads on the record.
As for the closing title-song “Utanför lagen” (Outside the law) you will really have to listen for yourselves…
The drums of Richard Ahl and the bass of Jens Åslund drives and urges and the guitars of Sören Dahlgren – I hear them in a slight breeze over Riddarfjärden (Knights Bay of central Stockholm), always exactly the curlicues wanted by the song.
And then: the Voice…
Listen more on Pär Enqvist Band’s site or on Spotify and visit them on on Facebook.
Även hjältar måste dö (Desperado)
Prygelland
Utanför lagen
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