Do you feel your thoughts are gathering speed, inventing more and more stories about the future and the past, slowly building up to anxiety?

Well here’s a remedy that could work:

Find a comfortable armchair, sit down, close your eyes, breathe deeply and listen to “Not Your Child” first, and then “In Your Arms” and why not the entire album “Wash Away the Past” which Karl invites you to download for free.

Karl is sometimes called a Swedish Peter Gabriel, and partly this is how I hear it also, as he sometimes produces the same feelings from his music. Wonderful. But I do feel that there is something else, another kind of closeness in Karl’s music and lyrics that gives a different kind of experience from listening.

One obvious example of this you’ll find in the song below “När jag blev mindre igen” where Karl sings in Swedish. This is a song that’s not part of the album, lyrics by Niklas Aurgrunn and that makes me dive into a feeling as if my entire life passes by in a few moments.
From the album “Wash Away the Past” you’ll also find below his collaboration with singer Sara Dahlgren : “Song to the Frozen People”.

Listen and enjoy:

Not Your Child
In My Arms
Song to the Frozen People (med Sara Dahlgren)
När jag blev mindre igen (text av Niklas Aurgrunn)

Ladda hem “Wash Away the Past” från Last.fm

Karl på Myspace

Andreas Lundgren comes back to us as “Bad Buddha”, his latest album which is free for download on his home page. It is an album that’s rich on influences from various sources; rock, blues, folk music, funk and a lot more; straight into a fantastic mix that I can’t describe in any other way other than that it’s Andreas Lundgren. I’m drawn into the songs with their driving beat, a beat that runs through everything in different ways.

I find an open Andreas, and it feels like a journey into the dark and out to the light, from separation to longing for love. And all the songs performed with Andreas special voice, a relaxed, yes, cool voice that really comes through.

To me, this is absolutely one of the best albums I’ve heard this year and I can only congratulate you for being able to download the entire album from his home page. There you will also find two of his earlier albums “Grande Cocktail Magic” and “Green Loafers & Husky Freaks”, also free for download.

Four songs from “Bad Buddha” to enjoy and download:

Breathing Gas
Purple Wonderlight
What the Hell
Moondance Woman

Andreas Lundgren’s home page “Banned From USA”

Andreas Lundgren on Myspace

About voices then. There are singers you admire and who impress you by their sheer power and/or range, and/or technique – the vibrato, that awesome wailing…but whom you never quite manage to embrace because they lack something else, something less easy to define, if it’s not simply enough the feeling I’m fumbling for, it’s as if they know better than most how to do it but never really grasped the why, so to speak (Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Carola, Tommy Körberg, although these examples are only generally valid and are of course based entirely on my own personal listening; the listener not being altogether unimportant in the field of song and music, after all it’s in hers or his ears and head it’s all happening, or not happening if you will…)

Anyway, on the other side we find those singers most voice coaches would regard hopeless, or “storytellers” rather than singers, but who according to their fans are the really stylish ones, because they sing with so much more than diaphragm and lungs and vocal chords, artists that in an instant can lose themselves in the words and almost mystically make them live. No matter where they went the night before they always instinctively know why they’re singing and therefore can’t ever fail (Dylan, Björk, Lundell, Hellström; well yes I know they too stumble every now and then but allow me some generalization, footnotes are so dull).

Then a few rare voices just are all nice and natural, voices to somehow lean back and heal in, more about hunches and identification than power or impression; it’s not as if you know them – you are idiotically sure that you do.

There it is, I believe I’ve managed to nail some small part of the fascination I’ve felt ever since I first heard Miss Allena a few years back. We’ve never met but she’s my best friend and my sister. Welcome to the family!

Here are two of my favourites, one in that inimitable missallenish swenglish, and one with lyrics by Nobel Prize winner Pärre Lagerkvist, who in my mind finds his final interpreter here. And don’t forget now to enjoy those ingenious minimalistic arrangements as well!

Var är den djupa glädje som jag söker?
By the Water

Visit Miss Allena and listen some more:

Miss Allena on Myspace

I really wish that I had experienced the classical concerts at CBGB in New York. Yes, I know that the club still exists, but I’m talking about the seventies with Ramones, Sex Pistols and Blondie. I also believe that The Headlines would have fit in perfectly there.

If you don’t know the Malmö band The Headlines, I can tell that it’s a band that tours frequently around Europe and that they recently have released their debut album “Plug ‘n’ Play”. They have toured with New York Dolls, The Levellers, Hanoi Rocks, to mention a few, and they started out in 2005!

The Headlines play a fascinating kind of rock, that sometimes can be compared with the early Green Day, and that’s brilliantly mixed with the sound of mandolins and saxophones.

The album is produced by Stry Terrarie (Ebba Grön, Kriminella Gitarrer), and is handled by the german label Radio Rebel Records!

Here you get a taste of the album “Plug ‘n’ Play”, with a few songs you can listen to and download:
All I Need
Let’s Get Together
With No One to Follow
You Gotta Go

Visit the band:
The official home page
On Myspace

(translated by Pär/Blindmen)

“Nu vaggas tång av gammal dyning” (“Now seaweed is rocked by old swell”, or something to that effect)… Equality from Linköping is generally curious and boundless as they say, with a catalogue playing rather furiously with the “genres” but right here&now I`m really just hungup on this little one. Perfect swedish kind of jazzy ballad like a brittler and more intimate and also funkier Staffan Percy…I thought at first, before realizing that despite of all the well administered and managed heritage he’s of course completely his own. Summer contemplation de luxe! “Rain rain washing the salt from my wound…”

Kobben

Equality on Myspace