Despite the constant influx of catchphrase-coordinated marketing campaigns that would lead you to believe that life-affirming records are released daily, it's forever rare to stumble upon one as consistently mind-blowing and aesthetically far-reaching as Dungen's Ta Det Lugnt. Because of this scarcity, when such an unexpected (and immediate) discovery does take place, it's like being struck by indescribable melodic lightning: Unlike discs that warrant facile disses or mediocre passing grades, the countless reasons for its boundless successes remain ineffable and shadowy despite repeat late-night close-listening sessions.
Simply put, Dungen exhibit all the signs of legitimate, hard-won staying power. Ta Det Lugnt is an exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity that evokes Keith Moon's drum fills on The Who Sell Out, the wraiths of unsung bedroom psyche celebrants, and the acoustic sustain and harmonizing of The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday, Ta Det Lugnt feels less like a new release than some ancient tome, a fully formed masterpiece dropped unexpectedly on corduroy laps from some blue-brown sky. It's so aesthetically tight, jangly verdant, and musty that even carbon dating insists that it could not be post-millennial.
To be sure, there's a major difference between retro and somehow embodying your parents' vintage zeitgeist: It's damn-near impossible to believe that the humming tubes, crackling drums, smoky backdrop, and complexly interwoven melodies on Ta Det Lugnt were birthed in a quick-fix iPod age. But perhaps even more impressive is that, despite the music's headiness and intricacy, its anachronistic results feel unusually effortless, earnest, and unpretentious: Dungen seem driven to this sound not for bloodless cred points, but out of a very sincere devotion to the music from a bygone era.
Accomplished beyond his years, 24-year-old Swedish multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes is the pin-up mastermind behind Dungen's vibrant polish. For the full duration of his third album's 13 bracing tracks, he perfectly inhabits-- and then expands upon-- his homeland's late-60s/early-70s acid-rock scene. Ta Det Lugnt particularly taps into the expansiveness of his Swedish psych predecessors, Pärson Sound, while maintaining a murky rocker edge: Imagine that band colliding with The Kinks, or Amon Düül II with Olivia Tremor Control, or Comets on Fire with The Zombies on their way to Terrastock.
Interested in pushing pop glitter to its limits, Ejstes doesn't go as far afield into psych-pop cliches like chirping birds and hippie atmospherics as his elder brethren, but his equally vintage garage sound allows a definite space for ethereality in the form of funereal dew-drop strings, free jazz breakdowns, brief whiffs of AM radio tuning, flute minuets, lushly cascading pianos, prog time changes, florid medieval chimes, sky-melting freakouts, church organs, fuzz-guitar jousts, doubled mountain-top whistles, roaring six-string solos, and autumnal instrumental interludes. It's obvious his songs are painstakingly arranged with a sense of depth, gradations, and tonal three-dimensionality redolent of something as off the charts as Pet Sounds.
Continually, there's a perfect push-and-pull between catchy melodies, roaring solos, and spaced-out dramaturgy-- the band's output is consistently upbeat even when heartbreakingly tranquil and melancholy. "Gjort Bort Sig" flutters and drifts, reaching for the outer realms, before catching a subtle hurricane of quicksand spirals behind doubled astronaut vocals. The sweet arboreal folk of "Festival" appears straightforward until it unleashes an echo-chamber bridge that absolutely shimmers. And the title track feels like chamber-pop expanded to include a psych history lesson.
Because I took Latin and not Swedish in high school, I have no idea what Ejstes is singing about, but I like the verbal opacity-- the way syllables meld to the Hammond, flute, violin, bass, drums, guitars, and the way it masks any potentially subpar lyric that might detract from such brilliant arrangements. Indeed, as the summer finally turns to dying leaves, Dungen's lush palette of mystical earth tones and trade winds seems the ideal soundscape. This has been one hell of a year for psych, folk, et. al., but even with such fine releases as Animal Collective's Sung Tongs and Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral, I doubt 2004 will birth a more blissful sonic encounter than Ta Det Lugnt.
