Early in 2007, Swedish label Labrador released its 10th-anniversary compilation, A Complete History of Popular Music. Better add another chapter. Stockholm's Club 8 consist of composer/multi-instrumentalist Johan Angergård-- who runs Labrador, fronts the Legends, and is a member of Acid House Kings-- and vocalist Karolina Komstedt. The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming is their sixth album, and though it's not a dramatic stylistic shift like some of the duo's previous discs, it's a warm, tender-hearted acoustic pop record, one that emotes through simplicity and gut-punching melodic turns rather than stagy histrionics.
It's also Club 8's second album named after a song by the Television Personalities, following 2003's Strangely Beautiful. Like those underrated English post-punks, the Swedish duo have always been unashamedly sensitive, but The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming has little of its namesakes' insular humor or moddish amphetamine edge. The faster songs, such as first singles "Heaven" and "Whatever You Want", use everyday language to convey social anxiety and existential pangs, countered by sprightly acoustic strums, organs, bongos, shakers, or whistling. A girl-group bass line and summery organs bring "Football Kids" the lonely charm of Glaswegian indie-popsters Camera Obscura, while "When I Come Around" is a sort of alternate perspective on Morrissey's "Suedehead", with Komstedt cooing casual come-ons to a lover whose dude is away: "I have no promises to keep/ Double bed where no one sleeps/ Now it's up to you." The organic instrumentation marks a turn from Club 8's recent run of electronic-oriented albums following Sarah Records-inspired 1996 debut Nouvelle.
Though the uptempo numbers are the obvious singles, it's the more somber material that allows The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming to work as an album. As on another of 2006's best Swedish records, Victoria Bergsman's Björn Yttling-produced Taken By Trees debut Open Field, slower tracks like "Leave the North" or "In the Morning" put vast, wintry spaces around direct, bedsit-style songwriting, achieving subtle grandeur through the way the way Komstedt's voice sighs from amid rumbling piano or echoey handclaps. Depressive "Hopes and Dreams" gives up some of the opening tracks' momentum, but it's needed to set up the bass-driven melancholia of "Everything Goes", which swears off hopes, dreams, and faith while imagining "a warm day in heaven."
Opener "Jesus, Walk With Me", like much of the album, represents an attempt to reconcile the beautiful ideal of faith (and the deep human need for, as the Television Personalities put it, "someone to share my life with") against secular modernity's skepticism: "Fool me into believing/ I don't care if you're deceiving me/ Before I go I need to be/ something more than the skin and bones you see." The words could be a metaphor for what we look for from pop singers, too. The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming convinces, and that's good news to be shared and stuck on some future Labrador anniversary comp. It ends as we'll be lucky if our own lives and loves (let alone dreams) do, with a goodbye.
