Henning Fürst and Eric Berglund aren't "real" pop stars; they just play them in Sweden. As electronic pop duo the Tough Alliance, Fürst and Berglund perform their live shows without instruments, committing the ultimate rock heresy of dancing and miming to pre-recorded tracks. (Just ask the Knife. Or Milli Vanilli.) The tracks themselves seem to aspire to platinum status, matching shiny digital beats to vaguely tropical synths, sugar-sweet melodies, and cryptic yet simple lyrics that often involve romance. If you weren't paying attention, you might think they had more in common with Ace of Base than with other Gothenburg-born groups such as the Knife or Love Is All.
Like Malcolm McLaren or the KLF, though, the Tough Alliance spike their pop with Situationist politics, sometimes to a point where it's difficult to separate the music from the group's broader arsenal of cultural weaponry. Fürst and Berglund certainly don't; as with Tony Wilson's Factory Records, their Sincerely Yours imprint (Air France, the Honeydrips) assigns a catalog number to everything from promo videos to bottles of wine. "A way to escape or a way to wage war?" they asked in Yours000, the first post on the label's website. The New Waves EP-- released last year in Europe and now finally available in North America via Summer Lovers Unlimited-- is probably both.
The disc represents a step forward from the inexperienced shoutiness of neverthelesss promising 2005 debut The New School, though at only four tracks New Waves inevitably feels slight next to new full-length A New Chance (which Summer Lovers Unlimited also hopes to bring to these shores eventually). The bright synths, dubby drum loops, and wistful lyrics of "Silly Crimes" make it a clear standout-- the kind of track it's hard to believe isn't on a proper album. With just a few words and a cheesy spring break vibe, the song manages to be fragile and emotionally rewarding without affecting the trappings of seriousness, as so many current indie spoilsports do. Even a rare precious line like "wasting love, ennobling hate" is surrounded by those purring bird-call synth noises.
The EP begins on a more confrontational note: "Kill this compromise," a voice repeats through Daft Punk-like vocoder on "Kill Kill Kill", basically a song fragment. The lyric will recur on *The New School'*s "Babylon". A more substantial testament to the Tough Alliance's unique vision is "25 Years and Runnin'", which imagines a life spent looking for a home while forever unable to shake some deep-seated inner woe. Vivid melodies and globetrotting lyrics pull a yearning pop victory from the jaws of Eurodance synths, 4x4 beats, some oddly Caribbean-style percussion, and crazed sound effects: "Now I know that New York is where a boy can have some fun/ If I only could change where I came from." Cheeky finale "Mine Was Real" covers the heartbreaking 1970 soul classic by Rozetta Johnson, adding the duo's wall-of-can-sound production but seeming to lose none of the original's sincerity. Now that's what I call détournement.
In keeping with the Tough Alliance's multimedia tactics, New Waves comes with a pair of videos. The clip for "Silly Crimes", called "Simple Games", shows girls jumping rope in the sun-dappled outdoors and in front of a film projection (a recurring visual motif of theirs) of splashing waves; its unbridled innocence leaves me wondering what darker subtext might or might not be lurking beneath. "25 Summers and Runnin'", the video for "25 Years and Runnin'", also encourages further scrutiny despite a somewhat more jumbled appearance, as a simple negative image of a running man is superimposed above shots of tennis players, migrating geese, and Tough Alliance gigs. If the duo's full political intentions aren't necessarily clear at the end of the EP, their musical ones are: Fürst and Berglund are a couple of punk-minded provocateurs who play pop not for camp value or hipster irony, but because it's the purest form of expression a boy has left.
