fri 29/03/2024

Sweden

Album: Viagra Boys - Cave World

The third album from Stockholm rowdies Viagra Boys doesn’t muck about with what they do, but it’s more persistently punkin’ than their last. There’s more than a snifter of Iggy and the Stooges in both the vocal style and the raucous over-amped...

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Album: Neneh Cherry - The Versions

Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh...

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Bergman Island review - Mia Hansen-Løve's joyful English-language debut

French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of...

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Album: Lykke Li - EYEYE

Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible...

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Album: Linnéa Talp - Arch of Motion

Contrary to the title’s implication, there initially seems to be little movement in Arch of Motion. A note is held on an organ. Then another note comes in and is also held. Chords build up gradually. Maybe one or two ascending or descending notes...

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Album: Sabaton - The War to End All Wars

Demonstrating how much the world really can change in a very short time when things spin out of control, Swedish power-metal five-piece Sabaton’s album now seems especially tasteless. It’s also a scalpel-sharp example of how important context is to...

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Blu-ray: Ingmar Bergman Vol 2

In my teens, I was one of the budding cinephiles who ran the Film Club at my boarding school. Once a month, we’d rent an arthouse movie. The films would be projected on the Saturday night.Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) was a revelation. As...

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Force Majeure, Donmar Warehouse review - fissures in a marriage

It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known...

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Albums of the Year 2021: Frida Hyvönen - Dream Of Independence

Frida Hyvönen’s UK profile isn’t as high as it is in her home country Sweden. Over here, what she gets up to is less apparent than the activities of some of her more heavily marketed fellow Swedes. Hence Dream Of Independence coming as a surprise,...

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Album: ABBA - Voyage

Immortality is reserved for monotheistic religions and Marvel superheroes, but in the material world, we also know Abba’s songs are ageless and will not die. After all, they have their Abbatars; we have our abattoirs.Their songs from the Seventies...

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theartsdesk at the Birgit Nilsson Days - the rich legacy of a farm girl turned diva

Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Dungen - Stadsvandringar

Dungen’s October 2005 appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien was incongruous. Here was a Swedish band on an independent label, singing in their native language, playing live on coast-to-coast mainstream US TV. The show’s host making a great...

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