Pop history is full of loners, rebels, and social misfits. As introverted adolescents, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain both got bullied. You could argue that rock'n'roll itself began with James Dean. No one can ever seem to agree on a better starting point, anyway-- Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" in 1951? T-Bone Walker's "Rock Awhile" in 1949? Uhh, Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" in 1922?-- so it might as well be a guy who lived fast, died at 24, and inspired everyone from Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles to Morrissey and Ian Curtis. If most rock long ago ceased to seem rebellious, maybe it's because the macho cock-rockers of the 1970s and 80s ignored Dean's most revolutionary (possibly apocryphal) dictum: "Only the gentle are ever really strong."
Dean shows up on Here Comes the Future, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut as the Honeydrips. So does plenty of other pop history-- Joy Division's Curtis included. Like the Knife, Jens Lekman, and Sincerely Yours label chiefs the Tough Alliance, Carlsson is based out of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he used to sing lead for Dorotea, a punk-spiked indie-pop group in the style of the Television Personalities, the Wedding Present, or the June Brides. A few years ago, Carlsson started releasing CD-Rs and a 7" single under his current moniker, moving a bit toward the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne. Embracing even more the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Carlsson has now built a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere-- and one of the best twee-pop albums of 2007.
"Please, let's not talk about the past," Carlsson sings on Here Comes the Future's title track. It's hard not to, though. For one thing, Carlsson's reverb-bathed vocals have the aching imperfections of Lawrence, from too-often-overlooked 1980s UK pop act Felt. And he's constantly invoking the past, whether lyrically or musically. Acoustic-jangling "I Wouldn't Know What to Do" imagines the intimate scene from the Smiths' classic awkward-mixtape starter, "Reel Around the Fountain" (you know, "15 minutes with you") and admits that he'd spend it in... virginal confusion. The most Field Mice-like moment, "Wait for the Grief to Come", is as "difficult" as that band in the intensity of its romanticized frailty: "I don't want to socialize, not tonight or tomorrow night," Carlsson whispers, as distant electric guitar doubles his winding acoustic guitar figures, joined by glockenspiel and, eventually, whistling. Good grief, eh?
As much as Carlsson may remember the past, he never merely revisits it. "It Was a Sunny Summer Day" sets a lockstep New Order bass riff beneath sighing, autumnal synths, beating back Mancunian misery via fair-weather melody until the whole song suddenly veers off into a Brazilian Carnivale. Then there's the obvious Joy Division nod, "(Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart", a wistful falling-out-of-love song with crackling Euro-house drum programming, faraway multi-tracked vocals by Hanna Göranson of Gothenburg electro-pop duo Cat 5, and a faltering rap verse (!) from Carlsson. If this one never gets played at a middle-school dance, the industry is in worse shape than we thought.
Here Comes the Future is packed with what the pros still call "perfect pop", but despite clocking in at just 34 minutes, it works as more than a collection of singles. "The Strangest Dream" starts off with a glance backward, then sets the emotional stakes dangerously high: "Last night I had the strangest dream/ I met the boy who raped you," Carlsson sings over intricate acoustic guitar, emphatic bass, tambourine, and a "Be My Baby" beat that is thankfully understated. "Trying Something New" combines more early-New Order rhythmic drive with arena-sized guitars, gusting synths, and terse lyrics about "a place where you and I can go." On "The Walk", tambourine backs a traipsing tune about a visit from ever-present Death. Amid flutes and loungey chords, finale "In Some Distant Future" goes back to to the opening "dream" theme, again on a scale that's both epic and intimate. Carlsson dreams of post-apocalyptic archaelogists, digging for clues about our civilization. They find a list of his dream girl's lovers-- and on it, our narrator's name.
Dean finally makes his appearance on "Fall From a Height", a hypnotic dance track that's based, as Saint Etienne have done before, on a couple of spoken-word samples. Appropriately, this is Here Comes the Future at its most existential and its most romantic alike. Carlsson sings about literally falling to his death, then turns sappily metaphorical: "I think I'm falling for you." Meanwhile, the kid version of Woody Allen's Annie Hall character won't do his homework because he just found out the universe is going to end someday so now he knows everything is pointless, and Dean's interjecting out of Rebel Without a Cause: "If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused, and I didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?" Please, let's not talk about the past.
As with the Field Mice, the Honeydrips will be anathema to some, especially those who conflate bravery with balls, the avant-garde with equipment-measuring, or sex with conquest. It may be in humanity's animal nature to exploit every weakness and avenge every grievance, but our species' greatest hits have always suggested we were capable of something more. (Nietzsche might call that "slave morality," but whatever, he got syphilis.) On the Honeydrips' MySpace page, Carlsson quotes a line from one of Felt's best songs: "It's better to be lost than to be found." Here comes the end of the universe.
