Reading time: 2 minutes I often wondered what it would be like if I was a muso and wrote a song praising my home town of Oldham. Not that there’s much to praise I’m afraid so it would be hard work. And then if I threw in a few words of encouragement for a Spanish town as well. Let’s […] The post Oscar Lund (Sweden) – Långedrag (Long Haul) (single/forthcoming album track) appeared first on Nordic Music Central ..read more

Reading time: 2 minutes I’m out of my comfort zone even attempting to review a jazz album or even a single track but I decided to have a go at this one when I read that the Danish guitarist Søren Lee was set to release an album and that while he is celebrated as a leading figure in the […] The post Søren Lee (Denmark) – Funky Motion (sample track from the album Hope) appeared first on Nordic Music Central ..read more

Generally speaking I find Finnish music to be pretty deep; what you’d expect from a country dubbed as the ‘happiest in the world’ but in which many suffer from depression, too. Oxymorons abound. Hence, you don’t often find light hearted pop ditties and the really weird stuff is left for their Eurovision songs. Ocelot has twice before appeared in these pages and they don’t shirk in the depth department. The first time, the song concerned butterflies and the second a character who was never casted in a fantasy film about a life that remains tantalisingly out of reach. Somehow, I can’t imagine ‘A ..read more

I thought all the Swedes were on vacation right now but Hazlett clearly isn’t as he launches this classy song ‘Shiver’ on an unsuspecting public. Hazlett, born in Australia but now ensconced in Sweden, took the option of recording it in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, one little delight many Scandies have at their disposal which would be much more difficult here, where the summer cabin in the country isn’t exactly a tradition. It’s part of a forthcoming EP which will be the second part of a project ‘Goodbye to the Valley Low’, the two effectively adding up to one album, and made up of indie ..read more

Perhaps it’s the extreme heat here on what is the UK’s hottest day of the year – a sweltering 27 degrees with ‘red alert – you’re all going to die’ warnings all over the meeja (can you believe that?) – but I mistook the artist’s name for ‘Our Kid’. Surely those warring Manc brothers couldn’t have got back together again in a different guise, could they? Nope; they haven’t. And Orkid offers up a different fare altogether; subtle, laid back and slightly melancholic pop in the traditional Swedish fashion. That wasn’t always the case. The last time she recorded, three years ago, she was more of a ..read more

Who was it that sang ‘Marry me’? It was St Vincent wasn’t it, in her formative artistic years before she became obsessed with fuzzy guitar shredding. Now Joselin takes that notion a stage further with a piece of grammar that Grammarly would probably disapprove of – ‘Marry myself’. But there’s a twist in the tale. It appears that Joselin would betroth herself to her alter ego as a sign that she is able to accept herself just the way she is. And that is important because Joselin was recently diagnosed with ADHD. She was here a few months back after signing to her label, Ninetone, and after enter ..read more

In the nicest way Lucifer Sunshine are anachronistic. They belong in another time and place. The ones I have in mind especially are San Francisco and 1969 respectively. They sound like they should be playing to an assembled mass of ‘Nam dodgers and stoned hippies in Candlestick Park just as counterculture was about to run its course by way of a damned festival to the east but all was still peace ‘n love, man. They even look the part, too. They are a psych-pop band from Stockholm, content to bend genres into their own style of dreamy, psychedelic pop. This, their latest single ‘My Immunity’, is ..read more

Hey ho, the football’s done for another couple of years so back to business. Us. The first person plural pronoun. Not one that you hear often in gender speak but one that is going to have a greater impact on you than any amount of ‘we/they.’ Pardon me again for repeating myself as I do habitually but this is the precise reason I do this job. Amongst all the very good songs I hear every day there is occasionally one that is at another level, and here it is. A little background first. Us are from Helsinki I think (part of the video below was shot there) and are a fairly new band. Even so they di ..read more

An intriguing and lengthy song from a forthcoming album by (Johan) Israelson is released today on the Novoton label, complete with a tasty video for your delectation. ‘Brother’ is a duet with friend and fellow musician Markus Mustonen. Apparently this is the long version of the song and weighs in at over seven minutes. It truly is a little tour-de-force this one, straight from the off with its nymph-like Juilliard ballet dancers performing amongst what could be Roman or Greek ruins or more recently, those of the desolately overpopulated, blood-soaked home of the Prince of Peace, to employ two ..read more

There is something about Touching Grace that amuses me. They are a Danish four piece, sometimes six piece, that was here only a couple of months back with the single ‘Virtue’, one that, like this new one, will be on their second album ‘Sunrise Meltdown’ which is scheduled for release in September. ‘Virtue’ is an epic song that incorporated all sorts of contrasting styles and part of an album which they somehow contrived to take 20 years to record. But that isn’t what has prompted the mirth. The story behind this latest song’s title, ‘Elephants & Armpits’, is that they have “an absurd amoun ..read more