The Amazing opened their self-titled debut album with an inspired reworking of a song from Fleetwood Mac's little-known post-Peter Green, pre-Buckingham/Nicks period. Named for 1968-72 Mac singer-guitarist Danny Kirwan, "The Kirwan Song" set a precedent for playing spot-the-references that the Swedish band's history-bursting blend of pastoral-England-meets-Laurel-Canyon psych-pop and folk-rock only invites further. Throw in a lineup that includes members of Swedish-language psych-rock monsters Dungen, and you could be forgiven for wondering if liking this stuff requires Talmudic knowledge of, say, the 80s Paisley Underground movement.
It doesn't. Happily, the Amazing's music is less reverent of its post-gold-rush past than might be obvious at first blush. Both on 2009's The Amazing and 2010's equally impressive Wait for the Light to Come mini-album, the band's impressionistically melancholy songwriting and gracefully unspooling instrumentals push toward the sort of poetic textural subtleties associated with post-rock or shoegaze. Simply put, it sounds pretty in headphones-- even if you can't quite make out all that frontman Christoff Gunrup is singing. He does use English, at least, though often here it's the feeling, the overall construction, that matters more.
Reine Fisk, who plays a mean lead guitar in Dungen as well as this band, has said all of the Amazing's records so far are roughly similar in mood, and he isn't kidding. Second proper LP Gentle Stream, out late last year overseas and due for a stateside release this fall on Partisan, by and large sticks to the Amazing's previous tendency to glide between winsome acoustic ballads and brawnier rockers, stretching out with easy-riding guitar solos and thoughtful, Mellotron-touched arrangements. References are still tough to avoid, whether it's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the organ-glazed title track, Nick Drake on the yearning flute- and sax-framed "Flashlight", or Simon and Garfunkel circa "Dangling Conversations" on bastards-rueing "The Fog". But as pleasantly jangly video selection "Gone" and harmony-bursting European-edition finale "When the Colours Change" best exemplify, this album is far richer than retro pastiche.
Gunrup's dewy vocals carry melodies that refuse to dissipate over multiple listens, and the drumming, in particular, makes these songs stand out, with a jazzy, rambling, naturalistic quality, punchy in just the right places. The descending Led Zeppelin riffage of "Dogs" might go on a little too long, and the mostly vocal-based, sub-two-minute "Assumptions" is the only real change-up. But when Gunrup sings, on the languidly shuffling American bonus track "Ghosts", of ways to "drive off the ghosts," he shouldn't be worried. Like other bands such as the Clientele, the Kings of Convenience, and Tame Impala, the Amazing have exorcized their turn-of-the-70s spooks by embracing the evanescent. A fine follow-up, Gentle Stream captures its namesake in soft, skilled hands.
