Like fellow recent Swedish exports Hives and Dungen, Maria Eriksson and Jari Haapalainen draw inspiration from the ghosts of rock's past. With the Concretes, Eriksson's guitar and Haapalainen's production helped build tracks reminiscent of a coupling between the Velvet Underground and the Ronettes. By the sound of Heikki, Ronnie Bennett musta been Lee Hazlewood's baby on the side.
Heikki's second full-length-- the first released in the U.S. by Magic Marker-- adds the twang of Hazlewood's mid-60s productions and looser, more improvisational arrangements to the Concretes' stylized indie pop. Eriksson's vocals are more Neko Case than Nancy Sinatra, and sound only a little like Concretes singer Victoria Bergman's winningly weak-nosed Nico. Together with Haapalainen's primarily acoustic guitar and a smattering of melodica, Heikki somehow end up sounding like a rougher Aislers Set.
Opener "Former Hero" hula-hoops through sticky Oklahoma summers as shown in a Scandinavian cinema, cleverly adding extra beats beneath the word "exaggerate" and sumptuous girl-group harmonies drawing apart over the words "again and again and again and again." Stiff-lipped "Election Day" kisses an old friend farewell, then "Still You Don't Know Me" dramatically confronts a familiar stranger who, like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, sees in the narrator only someone else he once knew. The best song, "Give It Back to You", revels in close female harmonies as it triumphantly rejects another unfeeling lover.
Still, these songs often fall short of similarly inclined efforts by groups like Camera Obscura. The lyrics often dwell too long in the realm of pop cliché ("all this time you kept it all inside"), which works better in the in-quotes music of The Concretes, where tracks like "You Can't Hurry Love" are both referential and satisfyingly irreverent. Covers of "Nothing Lasts" by overlooked 60s folkie Karen Beth and 80s Australian folk-pop group The Triffids' "Tender Is the Night (The Long Fidelity)" are somewhat draggy bonus tracks. The album isn't likely to win many fans who aren't already predisposed toward retro indie pop, but until the next Concretes outing, these boots will have to walk.
