One of the guys in I'm From Barcelona's latest video is wearing an A Place to Bury Strangers T-shirt. To anyone familiar with either the sunny Swedish collective or the gnashing Brooklyn pedal-mongers, this juxtaposition ought to be a little strange, maybe even funny. Sure, A Place to Bury Strangers issued their bleakly pummeling debut the same summer Emanuel Lundgren and his beaming band of Swedes were charming the crowds at their first-ever Lollapalooza, which proves-- actually, it proves absolutely nothing. But just making the comparison underscores how much has changed since 2007.
I'm From Barcelona, to their credit, have tried to change, too-- no easy task for a group peaking at 29 members. On the probably inevitable sophomore slump, Who Killed Harry Houdini?, they added nuance, melancholy, and an orchestral-pop epic finale that begins with a "giant silver labrador" and ends with Lundgren achingly insisting, "In my heart, I'm still a kid." Limited to 200 vinyl-only copies, 2010 triple-LP 27 Songs From Barcelona flipped the group's communal script on its head, giving each band member a song to sing solo, resulting in a wider variety of styles.
The band's third proper album, their second for the storied Mute label, generally shines with much the same chorus-of-your-pals friendliness as the debut. If you didn't like I'm From Barcelona when they first introduced themselves, probably no use catching up with them now. For listeners who saw in the group's Broadway-sized tweeness a way to convey indie pop's intimacy on a massive sing-along scale-- to teach the world to sing "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" in perfect social-democratic harmony-- well, there's good news and there's bad news.
Taken on its own terms, Forever Today offers plenty of upbeat, jingle-ready tunes with universal themes and a now 27-member band's worth of voices, handclaps, strings, horns, guitars, keyboards, bass, and so on; think Ra Ra Riot with some extra Swedish polish. The album grooves a bit more than before, particularly on the synth-poppy first single "Get in Line" (paradoxically, a sing-along about anti-conformity) and the "Heart of Glass"-shuffling "Skipping a Beat". And there's more insight into the music that makes these guys tick: a song that lists off different types of birds is named after maybe the greatest Bird of them all, "Charlie Parker", while "Dr. Landy" frets to a shrink about how Rubber Soul and "Be My Baby" changed the narrator's life. In a festival context, with such an unusual group (the Polyphonic Spree and Danielson are both different; so's Broken Social Scene), this stuff should still be enough to turn a few heads.
What's ultimately confounding about the album is how one-note its euphoria can be. The songs are almost interchangeable; the lyrics rarely stray beyond the easy cliché ("You gotta stay true to your heart" may be nice advice, but it's dull). Worse, I'm From Barcelona appear to be subtly shifting from artists who illuminate the problems of growing up by using childhood as a metaphor to artists who sing songs that might be best loved by, well, children. Then there's the fact that where I'm From Barcelona, the Boy Least Likely To, and others typically emphasize cuteness and sing about a protracted childhood, some of the most compelling voices on deferred adulthood in recent years have sampled hazily remembered 1980s pop and sung about a sort of protracted adolescence. But evolving trends aren't really the problem here: Younger acts like Cults, for one, definitely haven't been shy about brandishing their glockenspiels. "Do what you do, and do it all the way," sing I'm from Barcelona on Forever Today's closing title track. Again, a pretty good recommendation, but sometimes it still won't be quite enough to please everybody.
