Two months ago, nearly 100 acts played the sixth annual Primavera Sound festival, in Barcelona. Among them were Animal Collective, Deerhoof, Lou Reed, Sleater-Kinney, Television Personalities, Yo La Tengo, and a 29-member pop collective that claim to call the Catalan city home. Of course, Barcelona has had its share of visitors-- from the Romans, Moors, Franks and 1992 Olympians to new Raven-Symone jawn The Cheetah Girls 2: When in Spain-- but this time, it really is just a clever name: I'm From Barcelona hail from Jönköping, Sweden. Principal songwriter Emanuel Lundgren is a redhead. "This one is for you, and for you only," he told the crowd at the fest, who were soon chanting like Barça faithful at the Camp Nou.
Lundgren's cajoling conveys an intimacy that has always been essential to indie pop. In the mid-1990s, casually recorded tapes and seven-inch singles made listening to Tullycraft or the Softies feel like a private conversation, while the music's girly prettiness deterred the "Stairway to Heaven"-weaned. On early 2006 EP Don't Give Up on Your Dreams, Buddy! and now with debut full-length Let Me Introduce My Friends, I'm From Barcelona prefer to imagine grand indie pop symphonies, replacing the tape hiss and squeaky guitars of previous decades with multi-part harmonies, strings, horns, banjo, accordion, and kazoos-- while still scaring off anybody who gets carsick from precious songs about chicken pox and tree houses. Rather than superficial gestures of authenticity, I'm From Barcelona's cola-commercial chorale extends an invitation: One of these voices could be yours.
The voice at the center of these vivid arrangements is Lundgren's, a matter-of-fact salutation just on the square side from Beck's hipster deadpan. With the slightest trace of a Swedish accent, it's an everydude delivery well suited for light-hearted songs about everydude stuff like tape recorders, sleeping too late, and uh stamp-collecting; the lyrics are simple, but nearly always manage to find something transcendent in the mundane. Midtempo "Chicken Pox" applies the lesson of childhood illness to love: "Can't have it once you've had it," while "Rec & Play" makes its eponymous buttons the center of a multi-voice metaphor about capturing the moment. "This will be my favorite song," Lundgren beams. Fellow Swede and recent Sub Pop signee Loney, Dear lends his falsetto to "This Boy", battling Boy Least Likely To-like against maturity: "There's always gonna be this little boy inside of me/ And there's always gonna be this little girl inside of me."
The group's size makes the white-robed hordes of Polyphonic Spree an obvious comparison, but I'm From Barcelona's taut songwriting renders their numbers largely incidental-- these songs were meant to be shared by many voices. The multifarious instrumentation comes off as necessary, not schizophrenic, something like what you might expect from Beulah if they were Swedes. And at less than 38 minutes, Let Me Introduce Your Friends is too short for the lavishness to wear thin. In fact, I'm From Barcelona are at their best in their long farewells, from the end of modestly utopian "Treehouse"-- which impossibly bends and branches off in new directions as the choir basically just repeats, "I will build a treehouse"-- to the apparently Swedish-language hidden track. "We never wanna say goodbye," I'm From Barcelona cheer on the penultimate song, "Barcelona Loves You".
Anyway, why Barcelona? Why not Barcelona, the la-la chorus, familiar vocal abundance, and slight ska feel all seem to ask on "We're From Barcelona", far and away the album's best song. I'm From Barcelona explain, in their slightly skewed way: "I'm gonna sing this song with all of my friends/ And we're I'm from Barcelona/ Love is a feeling that we don't understand/ But we're gonna give it to ya." Like "Treehouse", it's about a "perfect place," but the choice of place itself may as well be arbitrary-- just, Barcelona, man, all right? Pop music, particularly the indie variety, has always been about belonging, yet there is always so much conflict over who belongs where. I'm From Barcelona are the band that wrote the song that could make Israel and Hezbollah get along-- don't these folks realize we're all from Barcelona? We bring them love! Next up, global warming.
