When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to ABBA songs. But since I’ve met you and moved to Sydney, I haven’t listened to one Abba song. That’s because my life is as good as an Abba song. It’s as good as Dancing Queen.
Having grown up on the North Coast when it was a far less fashionable place than it is now – when it was in many ways “the end of the line” – that was definitely a quote which captured my heart when “Muriel’s Wedding” was released in the 1990s. In fact, for a while this website was even named “Goodbye Porpoise Spit”.
Back in Lismore thirty years later and I’m not listening to ABBA songs on my cassette player. No, it’s Youtube these days, though I am still drawing musical inspiration from Sweden. Over the last couple of hours I’ve been discovering some new Swedish tunes which I thought I’d share.
The first two are by a singer called Juvelen (literally Jewel), born Jonas Pettersson, July 15, 1976, is an electro-pop singer from Stockholm, Sweden.
In one online review, he’s descirbed as
A Scandinavian Justin Timberlake, a male version of Robyn, or – as he describes himself – a one-man boy band: it’s easy enough to slap a label on Swedish pop upstart Juvelen, but that shouldn’t suggest that his soulful electronic dance-pop is simply derivative. Indeed, it’s surprising how few truly like-minded peers he has in the late 2000s – an period rife with exceptional female Scandinavian synth-poppers – given the era’s fascination with the electronic ’80s and, in particular, the output of Prince in his heyday, which is an undeniable reference point for Juvelen’s work.
I really like the pop sensibility in his music, his singing, and of course, he’s a bit of a spunk, isn’t he?
I’ve also been watching some clips by Familjen, a “group” centred around Swedish techno/electropop artist Johan T Karlsson. The song is great, though you get the impression the clip was made “on the cheap”.
And finally, not entirely Swedish… a band called Studio Killers which features members from Denmark, Finland and the UK. This is a great song/clip about not being able to get into a nightclub due to an over-zealous bouncer.
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