The Amazing emerged in 2009 as blissed-out psych-folk nostalgists. Their influences—which they wore openly and proudly, like treasured thrift-store finds—all dated to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: Hendrix, Cream, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, pre-Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac (whom they gleefully covered on their self-titled debut). This likely had something to do with their record collections, and the fact that the Amazing shared members with fellow Swedish psych-rockers Dungen, including the group’s phenomenal guitarist, Reine Fiske. The musicianship was certainly impressive—and the vibe appropriately stony—but the whole thing felt a bit slight.
The Amazing re-emerged four years after 2011’s Gentle Stream as an almost entirely different band. On 2015’s Picture You, the reference points had jumped 15 to 25 years into the future to encompass indie and alt rock from both sides of the Atlantic—the Cure, Red House Painters, the Smiths—and the music had grown starker, bleaker, and more wrenchingly beautiful. With his brooding, impressionistic tenor, singer Christoffer Gunrup sounded far more at home amid rain-drenched city streets then the sun-dappled backcountry lanes of his band’s early years.
*Ambulance *double-downs on the gloom, dispatching entirely with the riff rock that still tickled the edges of Picture You. This is mood music in the best sense of the term: insular, all-enveloping and deeply sensuous. The Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life. *Ambulance *is a long walk home from the bar in the dead of winter.
All this is insinuated, never spelled out directly. Gunrup sings in English, but soaks his words in reverb and harmony, leaving them largely indecipherable (and he never reveals his lyrics to the press). The phrases that peak through the fog—“Not today, not tonight, but soon,” “I know you had to let go,” “the made-up stories and the fucked-up lies”—paint a bleak enough picture, but it’s the tension and foreboding suggested by the music itself, and the super-lush, wide-angle production, that brings Gunrup’s dramas to life, gives them meaning and specificity. The endlessly chiming guitars are so warm and thick with reverb you could cut them with a steak knife, particularly on “Tracks”—essentially one long guitar solo, deconstructed over nearly seven minutes (Mogwai would be proud)—and the glacial, epically sad “Through City Lights.” You can practically feel the breeze blowing through “Floating,” a sparkling track that recalls the shoegaze-country twang of the sorely missed Mojave 3. As ever, lead-guitarist Reine Fiske and drummer Moussa Fadera, with his jazzy little snare fills, are the band’s stars.
It’s only when the Amazing veer off the chorus-heavy Anglo-rock path that the spell is broken. The funky noir thriller “Blair Drager,” though enjoyable on its own, sounds entirely out of place here—*Ambulance *is not a record you should be nodding your head to. And the album sputters to an anticlimactic finish with two ruminative acoustic tracks that ramble and shuffle from one section to another with little purpose.
Much like Mark Kozelek, Gunrup wears his bad humor like a badge of honor, and there’s more than a whiff of self-pity hanging over *Ambulance. *But as you tend to do with Kozelek, you forgive Gunrup for his self-obsessions, and love him anyway. The dope-happy, free-spirited version of the Amazing came across like a band playing dress-up with clothes a couple sizes too big. Now the shoes fit: The group has never sounded richer, fuller, or more confident in their own narcotic powers. Misery suits them.
