ØZWALD – Young Bloods
Genre: Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: The National, Arcade Fire, The Cure, Cigarettes After Sex
The whole point about pop music, even its alt-rock variants, is how hard it is to ignore. Most pop musicians know this and build their entire careers around this hope. Pop music is like a beautiful pin-up actress. It’s the cherry sundae ice cream. It’s the long bet that you’re told that you can’t possibly lose. It’s all the things that don’t do you any good but that you’ll never be able to resist.
Most fans of what continues to be dubbed alternative music have given up on trying to resist altogether. The days of printing stories of Kurt Cobain or Scott Weiland proclaiming their love for The Carpenters are gone. The secret is out. Even the most hardened metalheads listen to cheesy pop music. There’s no reason to hide it, and no novelty in announcing this to the world.
ØZWALD’s melodic sweetness is as hard to ignore on Young Bloods as ever. The group holds the dubious distinction of being the band reviewed most often on Alt77. It’s not because we want to. It’s not because they’ve bribed us. Simply, it is because, at its best, pop music can be ignored. ØZWALD keeps looking towards pop-music glory days for inspiration, constantly finds, and are, therefore, very hard to ignore.
Ola Kvaløy – No Hideaway
Genre: Indie Rock, Indie Pop
Similar artists: Peter Bjorn & John
Songwriters with a great ear for melodies are just like really attractive people. It doesn’t matter if it’s fair, but they almost always rule the world. Just how things go! And, frankly, this is the reason why throughout the past decades, it has been these songwriters that have received the greatest amount of compensation, whether they were writing toothpaste jingles or playing in the Beatles.
This doesn’t mean, however, that they also receive the respect that they deserve. The music fans that pride themselves on independent thinking and on embracing the kind of sounds that few others would find appealing tend to scoff at beautifully constructed pieces of melodic pop. They reckon, I suppose, that these are merely tricks meant to distract your ears from what is really important.
One of life’s funniest twists is that, ironically, the most beautifully melodic of pop variations is found in a place renowned for its cold weather and the predictability of its sagas. Ola Kvaløy’s No Hideaway is a gorgeous piece of Swedish pop-rock with enough artsy elements to make even the staunchest critic of these kinds of tricks warm their heart towards it. Just like a gorgeous specimen of the human species, this beautiful set of melodies can only be ignored for so long.
