i like the sweet life and the silence/

but it's the storm I believe in

Not a bad two weeks at the shopfloor. Due to the onset of chinese new year, and probable slowing down of the local distribution channels for the next few days, the higher ups decided to push for as many shipments to be brought forward. The result?

A natural bottleneck of the back room processing side that is starting to fray everyone's nerves. The good thing is that out of the many new releases, there are a couple of gems that finally make for fresh airplay choices.

You cant go wrong with more Swedish pop though, so just a week or so back the Cardigans finally released a ' best of' that came into store. I have not fully explored their old stuff yet, so this is a godsend though I have a faint feeling that they are the kind of band whose strength lies in an overall strong catalogue instead of a few chart burning singles. Eh ' Lovefool' not withstanding.

There is nothing like basking in the tune of the Cardigans' ' Rise & Shine' as one opens the shopfloor in the morning. My whistling has improved ( I think. Hope) over the past few weeks, and even as the usual few morning millers go about the aisles I still cant resist whistling a quick Cardigans chorus as it comes on the airplay.

There was a song in the collection that struck me over while I was behind the counter. It wasnt the usual ones like ' erase/rewind' ( I love you but it's best to forget it), for what's it worth ( I love you even though I dont really have a reason to anymore) or even 'connection ' ( a classic of classic break up song), oh arent the Swedes good at being sweet, but a song that was hidden halfway through entitled ' You're The Storm'.

You know how there are some songs that can just pass you by, but plain amazing when played * loud*? Well this is one of those songs. Don't believe me? Try it. Put the song on the right on, and turn the volume way up. Wait till the bit where Nina Persson blasts into the chorus..

and there you go. The lyrics are not particularly jaw dropping as songs on such a traditionally touchy topic go, but Nina has a way with words that go very well with her voice. I mean if you look at the lyrics of ' lovefool' and 'you're the storm' they can be too sweetly cringey if you want to look at it that way . Somehow she gets it right pat down and never goes aboard, resulting in an overall tune that you just cant say no to. I think this might be a Swedish secret racial trait.

If you watched ' across the universe' and remember the last part where the guy picks up the microphone on the roof and starts singing ' all you need is love', well if there ever was an occasion for me to do the same thing, which in all likelihood wont happen since im not that sort, I guess it would be this song, strong and full, blasting across the air in all its glory, not some pansy ' all you need is love'.

The Cardigans - You're The Storm

I read in the liner notes that it was awhile before Nina Persson stopped cringing at playbacks of her recorded voice. Im glad she did not give up then, for hers is a very unique voice that deserves to be appreciated very much so. Are there more people like that out there? Possibly possessing something that really is very attractive just that do not know it, and thus subsequently fade?

try this live set of the same song on a KCRW recording too.

The Cardigans - You're The Storm (Live)

surely time will come to an end soon/ but it's still on your side

Finally some time to sit and write. Or at least to finish up the half attempts at finishing up the post I started last Wednesday. About the first time I've finally gone to a live gig by a Swedish band, and was not disappointed in the least bit all. About the two who I went with without whom I'd not have heard about it in the first place.

Club 8/ Pelle Carlberg ( a double bill!) were scheduled to perform at the Esplanade's recital studio at eight, but dinner and agonizing choices that paralyzed us three over whether to buy their albums at the small counter set up in front of the entrance had to be overcome first. Well Jen got edson and a club 8 album, Grace the legends and another club 8 cd, while I cunningly cheated and bought a compilation of swedish music carried by the Labrador label.

We got pretty good seats as we were early in the queue, sitting ourselves to the left, not five meters away from the band's space. The intimacy and warmth of the studio was palpable and I loved it so, for the sheer proximity and lack of any barrier between us and the band allowed a real feeling of sincerity that was appropriate for the sparse/ heartfelt music to come. Note I do not use the word stage, just space. Until I figure out a way to transfer the pictures from my phone to the computer, we shall just have to make do though.

The spotlights warmed, and Club 8 took their places. Karolina was the last to walk in, but you can tell the whole studio really livened then. Her hair tied tightly back into a shoulder length tail, languid fingers that slowly wrapped themselves around the microphone, she had the whole sense of a coldness that is at once a touch chilling, yet unmistakably *alluring*. The banter was light and at ease, her remarking how pleasantly surprised the band was when they were greeted with a little tropical warmth after stepping off the airport. Sweden is *cold*, she said with a clear and crisp lightly accented english that just about tingled with little crystals at the edges, a characteristic I find common in much of the swedish music I hear.

The highlight of their performance for me would be a close fight between two songs. " The Next Step You'll Take" and their ' famous, or infamous rock and roll song' " Saturday Night Engine". You probably expect this from me now, as both songs were as different from each other as can be.

" The Next Step.." an autumnal and delicately bittersweet yet going along with a spring that belied its melancholy stood out with its particular lyrics, while " Saturday Night Engine" a full blast of unabashed hooky fun that was riffed through with so much energy and sheer life that it just swept me off. The recorded version here does not a single bit of justice to the one we heard. The live version was done twice as fast, sung with an immediancy of *here* and *now* that can never be captured on a mere microphone. My goal now is to hunt down a live version of this song, but still no luck though.

Pelle Carlberg took the stage after the brief interval, and what can I say. Hit songs and ping pong do not usually go together but there he does it. His songs are a fascinating blend of seemingly random inspirations-anecdotes, like when you want to sit down and ' offhandedly' write a poem, spend one hour wracking your brains for any memory to latch on, and finally scrounging out something that does not really matter in the end because it winds up sounding too forced anyway. The only difference is that Carlberg pulls it off. How? I have no idea. A song about a hit song his record label called him up to write? A song about a review of his first album? A song about hearing Im From Barcelona on the radio and being jealous about their chorus?

The thing is that while these were all interesting and catchy, they were too *at the moment*. I get the faint feeling that once the novelty is lost in these songs well they would be probably lost by then. Carlberg covered Mika's ' Grace Kelly' before he left the space. hm I still am just lukewarm towards that song.

There was an autograph session after the gig, which by sheer luck we found ourselves very near the front of the queue. Which meant that we would not feel as embarrassed to pester them with questions and requests then had we begun at the back of the queue and saw how tired they really were. Please allow a bit of embellishment, for a week can do many tricks to the fickle thing memory is.

me: would you recommend other Swedish bands to come to Singapore too?

Karolina: yes, of course.

me: ( before I could stop myself) what about the Concretes?

her: oh you heard of them? you know Victoria Bergsman has a solo album out.. taken by trees i think. You heard it? It's better than the Concretes I think.

me: ( inwardly --- urk! arhjhh! or if there ever is a single word to describe the kind of surprised contentment that comes when something unexpected happily overturns everything else) yes! Any chance you can ask her to come down to Singapore too?

her: yes ok, she has a really lovely voice. Ill be sure to tell her.

here then she smiled.
and my day was made.

Club 8 - The Next Step You'll Take

\
for Grace it would be when she was getting an autograph from Pelle Carlberg, and told him how sad she was that he did not play " Sunday, Lovely Sunday".

" ah so you were the one who shouted for it just now", referring to the part of his gig when he asked the floor for any requests. I admit I goaded grace a little I think * innocent look*. An interesting thing would be that the rest of audience was completely quiet, a fact that I only remember now.

So Carlberg, right there and there at the autograph table, serenaded ( yes serenaded) Grace. Jen was visibly impressed too.



Sundays are slow
Never pretentious, oh no
Silent and closed
And we don't really have to know
Where to go

Holding hands with the one I love
She wears mittens, I wear gloves
There must be someone above
Holding hands with the one I love



And her day was made there and then.
Probably for the next few days too.

i don't care where you're going/ if the music's fine

Club 8 - Saturday Night Engine

What a thoroughly enjoyable Scandinavian evening.
*nods to Jen and Grace*

ah but I really do need sleep now!

if I don't care to eat and get running instead

(nope, cant find the image with the bicycle)

Meh my sleep schedule is totally screwed.

2008 rolled in, and if I remember correctly it was the Concrete's ' You Cant Hurry Love' around 12. Just a quirk I find myself doing every year that does not mean anything, to note the song that comes up on my player, and the only way I really ' celebrate' when a year gasps out its last few seconds.

The first show on the small screen I watched this year would be Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which was delightfully lent to me. As again in his films, some of the songs arent bad at all! If a show didn't slip my mind, the last film I watched for the last year was the Breakfast At Tiffany's/ Die Hard 4.0 double bill at 4am viv's place. Weird combination you may think, but nothing like a brainless action show to unwind after hepburn. Tiffany's really not what you think though, there is a certain kind of absurd in it, and I mean the beckett/ harold pinter kind, and of course, there is hepburn. hah thanks for the poster viv. Anyhow I enjoyed both shows thoroughly , but really these musings do not belong here, so I shall leave them for another blog at another time.

Back to the screwed sleep schedule. I think it is actually affecting my playlists. For instance there is a certain kind of music that I find myself selecting as I wake in the morning and run like hell for the train. It's becoming a routine actually. Wake up grab breakfast plug on earphones get to station get on train carriage number 16 since it would exit right at dhoby ghaut's escalators. And when the shift is done, plug on another certain kind of music for the leisure walk from town to dhoby ghaut. Oh what happened to the days of having my playlists decided randomly by shuffle to ensure fairplay to all? ah how circumstances change.

I would be hard pressed to explain the *kind* of music I put on simply with words. But this song invariably finds itself played as the first song every morning for the past two weeks or so.

So someone said it was the perfect " my song" when she suggested tagging a song in a particular album to those that were there. I leave it up to the rest of the readers who know me here to judge. *takes cover*

Im From Barcelona - Oversleeping

Go look this band up if something in this song strikes and tugs at your interest. They are a Swedish ( haha what else can they be ) band that specializes in really constantly hyped music that you just *cant* not but smile to when you hear them.

Careful though tunes like this should be rationed for they lose their magic really quick overplayed. Argh but the temptation!

damn swedes.

you can tell this looking in my eyes

hm I really got to stop this habit of only transferring posts long overdued in my mind to type at four am in the morning. Never really liked sitting down in front of the keyboard just because a blog needs life, well see this and you might understand what I try to avoid---> http://xkcd.com/77/ .

Anyway, I finally decided to snap up Victoria Bergsman ( of swedish Concretes fame) debut solo album " Open Field" just last week. Looking back I do not understand why I had doubts about it when I first saw it on the shelf about a month ago but there we go. Just after I grabbed hold of the cd, an american couple came up and handed me a HMV stampcard, which just needed a purchase of $20 more in order to get the reward of $25 worth of anything from HMV. Oh yeh and in classic Zhanhui fashion of happily losing the bird in hand he drops the damned card while filling up the job application form at said outlet later. Bloody hell. Keep forgetting *both* my hands can be used to hold stuff now.

I suppose things like to balance themselves out, in a fashion anyway, as everything went smooth for the form and subsequent interviews the next day.

No that is a lie. It was only yesterday that I realized with a twisting fear in my gut that under " which artist released 'Blonde on Blonde' " I had filled in *Blondie* without thinking much...

No I may not really listen much to Bob Dylan but *still*, Blondie?!?!


Hah right that's enough, here is the song which you are here for.

Branching away from the 'sounds-complex- but-truthfully-devastatingly-elegant-and-simple' aesthetic of her ex band The Concretes, Victoria has chosen instead to focus on simpler, tighter arrangements woven around just her voice and a few other sparse instruments. What she fashioned, is this sense of *space*, of a starkness that has a kind of unblinking sincerity behind it. An openness that doesn't envelope but instead encompasses. It is the same kind of wow as ' Say Something New', but approached from the other direction, the beauty in pure sheerness kind.

She is right in bringing her amazing vocals to the forefront, for that and the careful arrangement in the songs make this album shine. Not in the sense of a bright burning star but the sure quiet glow of embers. But truly, like I quote from another " we don’t really need stripped-down arrangements and a cappella passages to know that Bergsman’s voice is special—this smoky, fragile/strong, entirely distinctive thing."

Ill put up the most obvious single from ' Open Field' here. The song is penned by Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura for her friend Victoria, and that I supposed lent the measured indie catchiness to the tune. There's a video up for it on youtube too.

Be sure to check up her myspace link too, you can practically sample the whole album there. ' Cedar Trees' is another gem.

Taken By Trees - Lost And Found

Well, call me different but there is this sense of Northern stoicism that Victoria Bergsman sings with, that I just kind of find myself identifying with.

and all the things I had in mind for you and me

Amazing the SAF finally allows access to YouTube and Blogger with certain computers in the camps.


If I could, I would try it all over again.

I found out that it's been some time since I last heard The Concretes. Not even " Say Something New". It's good hearing it again. Makes one realize that I have forgotten a little of its spirit along the way the last few months, doing things too fast and taking things too seriously, not really listening as much as I would like to another.

Forgetting the whimsical derring-do, the smile and grit, the easy flow of chimes and melody, the commitment failure heart.

Amazing too, what a song can do yes?

we could stick around and see this night through

It's the bongos I tell you! The bongos!

There has to be something in the Swedish air that subtly lead the people to create such amazing music inspite of their dark 30 day long nights ( thanks Frostbite, for that bit of knowledge). Here's Peter, Bjorn and John, joined by Victoria Bergman of The Concretes fame in a duet that sings of that fuzzy wordless happiness that can only come during that dazed first period of a relationship. When you’ve just met and only want to be with each other, whilst at the same time worrying about how much you want to show your true self to the other person so as not to scare them.

" Its lyrics capture the first mad rush of new love (and the strange calmness and certainty that can exist at the centre of its storm) with heartbreaking beauty." so say The Times in their review, and I can not agree more.

Her voice is a big draw, but it's the whole thing that eventually counts. Those crazy bongos ( the background hand-drummed pongpongpong-pongs that start about a minute and a half in... ) anywhere else would sound utterly insane, and the whistling is simply summer lovely. The slinky bassline that thumps itself happily away under your nose as you take in the pretenseless lyrics never tires you out, and before long you know you are listening to one of the best tunes of 06.

Edgy pop. Alternative folk. It does not really matter what you call it, for sometimes, you discover something so especially unique that you can never again find the same in another.

If I told you things I did before, told you how I used to be/
would you go along with someone like me?

That's cute.

Peter, Bjorn and John with Victoria Bergsman - Young Folks

Below for a link to PBJ's myspace site, where you can find a video of the song.

Yep that's Victoria. She recently split from the Concretes and gone solo. Her voice has always been around this blog, just listen to the first song on the radio blog above. Just for the record, iTunes shows that the playcount for Say Something New is 65 since sept 1 of last year.

so what can i do when i'm thinking of you

I swear i'm not inundating the readers with Swedish music on purpose but I really did not know The Shout Out Louds were from Sweden too until after I decided to write up about them and checked them out on allmusic.com.

Anyway The SOLs are sorta more like an ' indier' version of Mando Diao. The sheer energy and boyish confidence is as much present in here as it is in Mando Diao, perhaps a little brasher and rawer that may not be as " bluesy and soulful" rocky but veering along in a more sparkling and hearts-on-sleeve fashion. It is the catchy and distinctive arrangements that really make the SOLs stand out, all creative and unforgettable hooks ( like the Cure). It is easy for most songs singing of love and the dicey stuff to go overly kitschy and self indulgent, here fortunately the lead singer Adam always keeps it from turning that way ( unlike the Cure sometimes), instead using his unique voice to gel and match the sound together nicely.

Heh nice harmonicas on the song too.

THE SHOUT OUT LOUDS - MY FRIEND AND THE INK

their site, where you can sample more of their songs:

talk about the annoying weather/ while we are together

Yes it's another Swedish band, but don't worry it's not a screwy one like Komeda. Here's a gem of the old school garage rock kind, shaded with a little more bluesy and souful tint that makes it even more of a find.

There is a certain kind of swagger in ' She's So' that makes it particularly unique. I cant place whether that is due to the singer's scraggy offhand swedish lazy draw, the guitar mash in the background, or the lyrics that dont really make sense by themselves but suffice enough to create a certain fresh, cheerful and stylish way of looking at a very old subject- a crush on a girl.

You know how sometimes listening to a song reminds you very much of a certain place, whether it's because of the stuff you did there before or perhaps it is just that the general feel of the place fits the song? Right somehow, I associate this song very much with Parkway Parade ( look I really have no idea =/). Specifically PP's evening crowd, the outdoors Starbucks there.

There's just something about the East Coast I can't place, and something in ' She's So' echoes it.

MANDO DIAO - SHE'S SO

them on myspace, where you can get a few more songs:

happy lucky people (don't know/don't owe)

Bloody Swedes!

What is it with them that allows such bloody *bright* music to be spun out so often from a land covered 2/3rds of the time in long scandinavian nights? Whatever it is, they need to bottle it up and send it over to singapore. The ingredients list would probably go something like:

1/24 guitar rhythms so sparkingly addictive that you do not know
whether to laugh or cry
1/24 CASIO worthy beepy electronics
1/18 sweetly summery sassy vocals that do not let go
1/18 TGIF burst out of school/office/camp doors with
trailing swirly colours
1/18 criminally simple lyrical directions for leading life
1/4 roundandroundandroundandroundandroundkickasschorus
1/2 sincerity that makes all the above grounded and never
over the top

NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURINGS OR COLOURINGS
MAY CONTAIN NUTS

Komeda - Happyment

since they have disbanded and their site folded..on allmusic:

something to listen to after too much jamc, mazzy star and the like

what a strange thing to say as you passed me by on your way out

Welcome.

Here's a blog, simply about music I love. What you will find here will be songs I have somehow stumbled across and have grown to appreciate so much so that I find them worth sharing. They are not bound by genre or age or any of that sort, but do not look here if you are looking for informed and professional music criticism. This blog is just a journal of sorts of the tunes I discover along the way, and from time to time one or two 'older' songs will be featured. To sample the songs, use the nifty radioblog on the right, and if you find that you like some, dont hesitate to ask me on messenger! It will be my pleasure.

To kick things off, here's the song that this blog is named after. The Concretes are a band from Sweden that realizes sometimes, all it takes is just a simple guitar hook, one woman's voice, and a melancholic melody to create a beautiful piece of music. Gorgeously lush, yet somehow shimmering with a quiet promise, this is the kind of tune that you do not take note on your first listen. But after some time, whether five minutes later or a month, it slowly seeps back in your mind and just sits there, beckoning for you to listen to it once more. Again. And again.

The Concretes - Say Something New

Even better, catch the video on their site.