Just when I fool myself into thinking every indie group from Sweden approaches rock from the same refreshing angle as, say, the Cardigans or Love Is All, a band like Stockholm's Blackstrap pinches me, and I remember this supposed music utopia also spawned the likes of Soundtrack of Our Lives and the Sounds. Hiding behind a readymade wall of sound, Blackstrap offers an inexhaustible array of profound reverb and full-tilt choruses. As tempting as their shoegaze habit sounds on paper, the band's delusions of arena rock grandeur render sophomore album Steal My Horses and Run a real un-pretty piece of art.
Considering the band's countless similarities to fellow Tee Pee acts the Warlocks and Brian Jonestown Massacre, it'd be easy to construct a retconned bio of Blackstrap growing up in some unsavory West Coast city, hooked on heroin and hand-me-down 45s. Fist-pumping fuzz anthems play tag team with languished blues ballads, and the track titles (e.g. "Lay Down Low", "The Bitter, The Sweet", "Still Sore") make no bones about the pathos here. Regardless of drug-test results and geographical fawning, though, these Swedes ape mind-altering genres in the most organized, deliberate manners possible. Whereas the BJM or Warlocks obsess over a particular niche of psych-rock for entire albums at a time, Blackstrap's sensibilities fall in line with more polished, accessible "bad boys" like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Dandy Warhols.
Every track on Steal My Horses gets exactly the sound it wants, from the sweeping open chords of the Swervedriver-inspired "City Beat" to the dust bowl acoustic on "Still Sore". Ironically, the immaculate execution of all these styles causes the album to sound homogenous in its uniform cleanliness. The shared vocal duties between Jonatan Westh and Maria Lindén staves off the ho-hum songwriting, but only to a point. The Linden-led "Repulsion", the band's closest stab at MBV, contains more hooks than the rest of the record put together. At Westh's brightest spots, he rivals 120 Days' Ådne Meisfjord for the "Scandinavian Bono" title, but he often fails to match his band's instrumental pompousness. "Lay Down Low", for one, gets sloppy with U2's "Elevation" formula, juxtaposing an engine-revving verse with a mild-mannered psych chorus.
Steal My Horses' shortcomings ultimately stem from their desire to suck all the playfulness out of genres already hurting for some levity. There's not one lyric or riff that sticks in your brain by the album's conclusion. This would be fine if the band's goal were atmospheric shoegaze, but the rigid verse-chorus-verse patterns of these songs suggest a kind of immediacy the tracks can't deliver. While no one wants another Anton Newcombe-sized ego in indie rock, a little bit of animal magnetism wouldn't hurt this band, not when their most charismatic member is the effects pedal.
