The word on the streets (and by this I mean the spieled sophistry coursing through press releases and talk shows) is that The Sounds are a perky, lovable bunch of Swedes that meld punk and new wave. In actuality, they're more a conjoining of less irritating pop of the 80s (The Ramones, Blondie) with the more irritating pop of the 80s (Loverboy, Pat Benatar). Now, 80s pop might mean a lot of things to a lot of people, infused with an ambiguity beyond description, but whatever we mutter about it under our breaths, the word "punk" seldom comes up in relation.
Dashing all expectations, however, The Sounds have a song called "Riot". Now I may not have passed Punk 101; I admit I still don't really know what Crass was. But my general intuition is that if you have a song called "Riot" anything, you are probably punk. Also, a vast majority of these songs are what we might have considered to be punk in middle school. There's probably not a great distance between The Sounds' titular song and your typical intentionally unrealistic adolescent Offspring song. It's a lot of "We don't care about the world today/ We're not living in America and we're not sorry" and tales of "teenage porn stars." (Never mind that the average American probably sees an indissoluble link between Sweden and porn.) This is about the gist of most of the songs that aren't about "getting up and dancing." And hey, I ain't complaining. It's a pretty simple political philosophy (yes to porn stars and dancing, no to America) that even the most jaded of today's younglings might clamor to embrace.
It would be a grave disservice to all involved, however, to call this boisterous, jubilant, sleepover-at-Casey's disco-punk rampage "political music." In fact, it's ironi-feminism. On the perversely appealing "Hit Me", Maja Ivarsson enjoins us (or me, anyway), to "hit me hard, hit me right between the eyes." I admit, the offer intrigued me; it took a strong recollection of my spiritual training to refuse to comply. But this brutal temptation to deck an innocent girl was merely my willingness to participate in a faux-jazz, hyper-propulsive grime accented by a keyboardist (Jesper Anderberg) who clearly doesn't even know where his volume control is, let alone how notes played together might constitute a chord.
But permit me to make amends for my long and tedious-- and perhaps unfair-- grievances. The ensuing song, "Mine for Life", is a faithful duplication of Garbagesque camp that attaches a maleficent beat to some quivering synths. We can make fun of Ivarsson's lyrics all we want. The fact of the matter is that the line, "If this is called living, well don't count me in," is at least worthy of a Ramones song; I'm pretty sure I heard it somewhere on "Tombstone Blues". "Rock 'n' Roll" musters just the right amount of capriciousness and martyrdom in the name of rock. It would make many cringe, but deflects any criticism. The song is fully aware that it is, at best, a two-note bass riff with an angular chorus straight out of the "Hawaii 5-0" theme.
More often than not, Living in America trades melody and choruses for jumping octaves and rapid-fire synthesizer scales. Of course, sometimes that's exactly what the alcohol doctor prescribed. This music, like most of Sweden, is entirely dedicated to senseless and irresponsible fun. It was designed to be listened to and forgotten on the radio, not to be compiled as an album. Fully understanding the triteness of the following, I'm still compelled by Pitchfork's Hippocratic oath: While every song might not sound exactly the same, a good three-fifths do. I think the general arbitrary consensus is that if you're at that age where you just discovered pop music, go for it; this is exactly the type of album you should be constantly enjoying; if you're not going to Cub Scouts this summer, you really should have found something a little more sophisticated by now.
