A couple of months ago The Plastic Pals released their debut album “Good Karma Café”. A solid, exciting rock and powerpop album with a collection of strong tracks with The Plastic Pals’ own special sound. It feels like great retro mixture molded into something new. I get so many associations to this that I find it hard to tell them apart into some kind of description.

Sixties pop, psychadelia, Blue Öyster Cult, Television, and yes it feels clean and rough at the same time. I really love the vocals from Håkan Soold, which adds a lot of soul to the music and keeps everything together. A really good album that grows each time I listen to it.

Below you’ll find a couple of tracks from Good Karma Café plus a video. Visit The Plastic Pals on Myspace to listen and read more.

She’s Going Back:

Here Comes the Sun
Long and Lovely

I wrote earlier about Shotgun Crackers here on Meadowmusic, and I have listened a lot to their songs. I get a real feeling of joy when I listen to them.
The band has just completed their new EP “Kpptsch” (is it maybe the sound of the snare and the cymbal?) and they release it here on Meadowmusic first, for everyone to download!

It’s just as playful as before but it sounds more “mature”. And I mean that in a positive sense, the guys in the band are incredibly musical and play well together. That was a fact also before, but now it feels like they really have found eachother and feel more secure with what they do.

In the songs you can listen to here, Shotgun Crackers are not afraid to try new directions and play with the music and the result is so nice and liberating.
The singer, Fredrik, is really good and in the only song in Swedish, he sounds startingly like Håkan Hellström!

Congratulations for being one of the first who can download the new EP from Shotgun Crackers!

Khpptsch:

1. Trevor
2. Happiness of Flowers
3. Runner Runner
4. Allt va vi vill ha

Shotgun Crackers on Myspace

Keep cool,
Jeppe

– with real hip hop muscles

He likes to ride the bike against the wind, eat meatballs and he likes soft nights at home. And maybe it’s there he finds all inspiration to his songs. Because this mr Fredric is the face of productivity. He releases songs all the time in a high pace.

This guy from Jakobsberg in Stockholm moves smoothly among the hip hop elite in Sweden and delivers romantic themes or philosophical speculations about life and love.

This is how he presents himself in a clip:

And listen to this: Fredric feat. Frida Muranius and Mattias Welin. It’s a little like Me Tarzan and You Jane, and I fully love it. A warm-up party song that should be a hit among the winedrinking mothers of bothersome teenagers. It’s an enigma to me that it’s not constantly played on all the Swedish radio stations, as it’s a smashing superhit bomb according to me:

Fantasi (with Frida and Mattias)

Heres another song from Fredric:

Du kom du gick

Fredric is now working on his new site, where he will upload 19 new songs, all free for download! So keep a look at Fredric’s site.

In the meantime you can visit him on Myspace where you for example can listen to a couple of cool collaborations with Melina and Anthon.

What the Lund based band Brainpool left in the 90’s and the Gothenburg based band Bad Cash Quartet picked up at the beginning of the 21st century is now taken a step further by Shotgun Crackers from Norrtälje, north of Stockholm!

Don’t be fooled by the slightly metal sounding name. Shotgun Crackers offers a fantastic mix of great melodies, marvellous vocals (in that extremely cool childish way), accomplished musicians…..and….hand claps…..(there should definitely be more hand claps in songs!!), combined with pop music that, at times, closes in on the Beatles.

That’s what i think…

…make up your own mind:

Blood Tears and Dreams
The Worst Love
She Wouldn’t Mind

You’ll Find Shotgun Crackers on Myspace

(translated by Clint Hell)