![]() "Jazz was coming here quite early on, and then later on we had our own crop of bands trying to be like The Beatles. "There's a long history of Sweden welcoming music from Europe and the United States, going back to the 1940s and '50s," Olenius pointed out. I believe they have just opened an ABBA museum this week in Stockholm, so they are being appreciated much more now than perhaps they were before." You have to admire the way they used vocal harmonies, keyboard and drums. I don't think we were really influenced by them, but we did hear that music all the time. "We tended to think their music was a little bit cheesy when it first came out. "ABBA always seemed to be much bigger in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia than they were at home," Olenius noted. The new album reminded us of '80s hitmakers INXS, for both its compelling dance rhythms, and its edgy rock elements. But the Shout Out Louds don't think they were much influenced by that quartet, and some critics have compared them more to 1980's indie-rockers like The Cure, or The Smiths. Probably every American who hears the phrase "Swedish pop band" thinks immediately of ABBA. Even ABBA songs often had very sad lyrics." But our Swedish songs tend to be much lighter than that, and naturally we come out of that tradition. Their country obviously has had more suffering throughout history than Sweden. Their songs are all so sad, and all about suffering. "Of course, we are not as sad as Russians! I was in a small town in Russia, and we were sitting around with some Russian singers doing a bunch of their drinking songs. "There is perhaps a tradition of bittersweet, somewhat melancholy songs from Sweden," said Olenius. Elsewhere on the album, cuts like "Where You Come In" and "Destroy" feature more orchestral arrangements, as if they were telling a whole story simply through their melodic development-yet still withn that insistent rhythmic foundation. The first few singles from the new CD, "Sugar" and "Illusions," and "Blue Ice" are wonderfully textured arrangements which still ride along an infectious groove. Of course, musically the songs are kinetic and soaring, even if some of the lyrics may hint at more complex attitudes. The music we do here on this album has to do with those seasons." It is such a wild contrast, that people get a little crazy. Then, in May-June, the sun never goes down, and you get very little darkness. ![]() For four months of the year, light is a delicacy in Sweden. "You have like one hour of daylight per day. "We have a crazy few months, like December-January, up in the north," said Olenius. The unqiue relationship people living in their country have with light and dark also plays a key role in informing the tunes on "Optica,' as well as providing the allusion in the title. One direction they wanted to go for with this new one was bolder and brighter melodies,more direct feelings and themes. The Shout Out Louds felt that the previous album had been a bit grey, dealing in ambivalent themes and feelings. It gave us more freedom-every idea was potentially a good idea-and then after a certain point we had to have a filter and see how it all fit together." But we slipped past the whole rehearsal thing, and avoided everyone falling into those typical roles we'd take on in rehearsal. Generally, between writing, rehearsing, recoding, doing artwork and videos, you're immersed in this project for up to three years. "Usually we come up with our ideas and then work them out in our rehearsal space, before recording. "One big difference this time is that we did away with the rehearsal space sessions," Olenius added. But this time we wanted to do one while spending a lot of time in the studio, playing around more with the keyboards and the other machines." We had really liked the way that album was recorded, in a very traditional way. You naturally want to break from the past, and do something different. "We were then touring on that music for two years straight, and when you do that, there's always a reaction. "When we did 'Work' we were very happy with it," said Olenius, from a Philadelphia tour stop. For their third album, Shout Out Louds went to Seattle to work under the hand of producer Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, Built to Spill, The Shins), and 2010's "Work" gathered still more interest and glittery reviews for the Stockholm quintet. ![]() Shout Out Louds enlisted a guest singer on thir second CD, as Lykke Li joiend them on 2007's "Our Ill Wills," and their profile continued to rise. ![]()
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