This Vision are releasing their second album on May 11th. As an appetizer they have released the excellent single “20th Century” and yesterday also the video for the opening track, “Ashes”. Judging from “20th Century” the sound is no longer only about pure electronica with vibes from the eighties, but the development of the sound makes me feel even more of eighties’ retro, especially since I grew up during that decade. Maybe more New Order now than Pet Shop Boys I’d say, even if the band themselves say that they are more inspired by the Cure from those days.

You can follow This Vision on their site and on Facebook. Listen more on Spotify and on Wimp.

20th Century

A little more than a year ago I wrote about the duo The Loveable Tulips and their collaboration with producer Jari Haapalainen. Now they’ve released a new three-track EP, “Streets”, this time with Johan Eckerblad as the producer. And there is a different vibe to these songs, where they have changed the big rooms for a more intimate atmosphere and more from the sixties than from the eighties.

Follow theom on their site or on Facebook. Listen more on Spotify. Here’s the title song:

Streets

The indie pop duo The Sweet Serenades are back with a hint of how their upcoming album will sound like. Here’s the first single “Moving On”.

You can find Sweet Serenades on their site and on Facebook. Listen on Spotify.

Moving On

During years Emil Fitger was a singer, songwriter and guitarist in the alternative metal band Melaina, a band I’ve written about before. The band split up a couple of years ago and Emil decided to continue as a solo artist.

This has now resulted in his debut album “A Long Wait Beneath the Snow” where he’s heading in a quite different direction than before. First of all it’s about electro pop with nice, somewhat melancholic melodies, but his acoustic guitars and different influences makes this a quite varied album.

From the harder industry vibing start with “Forgotten Streets”, to the dance pop beat in “Numb”, to the beautiful, ambient “Levanah” to the finishing, almost hymnlike “Rays of Light” to name some examples. Emil has a good, smooth voice for this and experiments a lot with effects and overlays on the vocals, which works really well in most cases, even if I think it gets over the top in some song where it makes me feel too distanced to the song.

You can listen more on Emil’s Facebook page and on Spotify. Here’s the first song on the album, “Forgotten Streets” plus the videon to “Numb”.

Forgotten Streets

I’ve written about Let’s Say We Did a couple of times before here on the blog. Then it was about their EP trilogy, where the last one was released about a year ago. I November they released their first full length album, an album where you will recognize about half of the songs from the the EP:s.

Everything has a new production, though, with Pelle Gunnerfeldt behind the wheel, and I think that he’s done a really good job at refining the band’s nice, rough indie pop. The sound feels more open, with more depth and with a good variation, but still with that rough feeling over these charming pop melodies.

The band name exposes something of their influences, as the singer Sebastian Fors tells me that the name is taken from the song “Let’s Not and Say We Did” by Silver Jews.

You can find Let’s Say We Did on their Facebook page and you can listen on Bandcamp or on Spotify. Here is the first song from the album “It’s OK” plus the latest video “Blue Skies”:

It’s OK