On February 28th The Mary Onettes will release the new EP “Love Forever”. For the first time, they have collaborated with an external producer, Dan Lissvik, which of course also affect how they sound. They write about the change:

Gone are the echoing reverbs, the 80’s guitars and the big, splashing drums. “Love Forever” is a wonder of genre-blurring fearlessness drawing on ambient textures, avant-garde rhythms and intricate arrangements.

As a taste of the EP, they have released the first song, “Love’s Taking Strange Ways”, which you can listen to and download below. You can find The Mary Onettes on Facebook or on their site.

Love’s Taking Strange Ways

Joakim Jakobsson is a former member of The Search and last year he started the band Duellen (The Duel) together with Argentinian Brian Biezki. Brian soon left the band and instead the former The Search-members Tina Bergström and Mikael Saltzman plus Olle Bilius (Jeniferever) and Simon Lundström entered the band. Then in december the five-track debut EP was released.

It’s indie pop in Swedish, rather darkly colored, radiating with vibes from the eighties’ new wave scene. They vary smoothly from synth based songs to guitar driven ones without losing the atmosphere. Straight melodies that stick quite fast on a good EP that promises more.

You can listen to the EP on Duellen’s Bandcamp page and on Spotify. You can follow the band on Facebook.

Sanningen

Four years after the last album The Culture In Memoriam released the third album, “Rest In Pieces”, in the end of last year. Behind the artist name we find Victor Håkansson as the only permanent member together with a range of musicians in what Victor calls a music collective.

Pavestone pop he calls the music which in more than one way symbolise the music, also in a way like two opposites meet. The beautiful melodies, the string and backing vocals arrangements that give an air of classic bombastic pop from both the sixties and the seventies, and at the same time the distortion, the unpolished and fragility in Victor’s voice that give everything a raw indie vibe. Together with the critical lyrics it all ends up as an urgent message.

I haven’t listened to the earlier albums, so I can’t compare, but to me “Rest In Pieces” feels like a solid album that grows after time, with no in-between tracks at all. Listen here below to the first song of the album, “Run Emelie”.

You can find The Culture In Memoriam on the home page, on Facebook and on Spotify.

Run Emelie

Klifton Filente released the new album “Breaking the Clouds” in the end of the last year. It’s a good album with nice melodies in the same spirit as the last album “Common Ground”. I don’t think, though, that “Breaking the Clouds” reaches the same heights as the predecessor, but if you’re a Klifton-fan, you won’t be dissappointed.

The artist name Klifton Filente is, according to the man behind it, Jonas Lundvall, a play with words. In french you say “un étoile filante” (a falling star, a meteorite), and this frase stuck with him a couple of years ago when he started the project, and was transformed into Klifton Filente.

You can listen to and download the album for free on his Bandcamp page. It’s also available on Spotify.

Foremost of the Westeners

In November Black Guillemot, hailing from Göteborg, released their first EP, “Knut Hamsun”. The band consists of members from Jet Link and Since Our First Guitar, two bands I have presented here before. And it’s also easy to recognize Josef Wikström’s characteristic vocals in these indie pop vibing songs.

You can listen to three good songs and download them on the band’s Bandcamp page. You can also find them on Facebook and on Spotify.

The band name comes from Josef Wikström’s fascination for birds and especially bird legs. He says that he would like to try to have bird legs one day, preferably thick and resilient ones, like ostrich legs.

He was looking for bird names that sounded good, found that Red-Footed Falcon didn’t work as a band name, and finally found the bird Black Guillemot, which sounded cool (tordmule in Swedish).

Here’s the title track from the EP:

Knut Hamsun