
St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club – Stockholm Central Station
It’s not a coincidence that all of the videos of The Beatles smiling, laughing and playing around are from their earliest days of touring and making records. Those are famous images that even your grandma knows and likes. The jury is split around all of the pictures and films taken of them. While sure they produced their best work by far in their final years together, there wasn’t laughing about going on.
The truth is that the bands who are both happy and successful are those who peak early and break up soon after they’ve done so. The truthful stories of big groups touring one or two decades into their career are tales of resentment, venom and unpleasantness. After a while, it is just a bunch of business people who happen to play guitars, trying to get by. But this is not what the world wants from them.
The trick about St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club’s “Stockholm Central Station” is that it sounds like an old-fashioned guitar band in its infancy. There is an excitement and collective buzz from the people who are on this recording that really sells it. Musically, it greatly resembles British indie-rock bands, especially the oldie recordings produced in England that might have influenced them. It almost sounds like a skiffle. And if there’s anything that Swedish bands know how to do, it’s to pick up influences and redo them well.
Sunbuzz – Desiree Today
Pop sounds and the songwriting behind those evolve constantly. That is how it should be. Extract each particularly trendy sound from the period in which it was made, and you will have something that defines the era. Play a Chuck Berry riff in a movie scene, and you know we’re in the 50s. Play a synthesiser part over monotone vocals, and you know we’re now in the 80s.
But the fact is that most of the really successful pop songs, regardless of the era in which they were made, have a thread woven into each one of them. It’s easy to spot the similarities. The majority of them are love songs or even tales of breakups. All of them have strong melodies that can be chanted by large crowds. They are very smartly orchestrated and structured. The singer usually hits a few high notes in the chorus. These songs work so well that they can be hits at any time, regardless of the pressure of trends.
Sunbuzz attempt with “Desiree Today” to write a classic pop-rock song, the kind that Eagles or Rainbow would’ve covered in a bid to get a hit and get their album sales off the ground. The point of this is that this is kind of writing is rare, but also very malleable. “Desiree Today” works well in his kind of classic/alt-rock hybrid. With its catchy melodies and universal themes of love and loss, it’s the kind of song that most of the cool alternative bands would like to have in their back pockets.