everyone's from sweden

raise your hand if you remember when glasgow was awesome. okay, i mean, not the town. the town is sort of ugly and depressing in a way that only an economically static factory town can be. but think back to like 2004... {{DREAM SEQUENCE}} ...franz ferdinand had just come out with their first album (and hadn't had time yet to rush their second album into cultural oblivion). you had finally heard a belle and sebastian song that made you want to fall in love (instead of just mock them mercilessly). you might have heard of camera obscura. travis had hit the mainstream (and by "the mainstream" i obviously mean "the overhead on the coaches in oxford"). maybe you hadn't heard of dogs die in hot cars, or orange juice (the post-punk band that broke up in the eighties but who could only influence the glasgow music scene more if edwyn collins was physically sitting on it). but, the point is, everyone was starting to realise: glasgow was a goldmine of good shit.

{{END DREAM SEQUENCE}}

so. that was fun for awhile. but then - as often happens with mines - it ran dry. there was no more goldshit to be found. belle and sebastian didn't release another album for a couple years. franz ferdinand unfortunately did. you went to see camera obscura in concert and they were good but you weren't absolutely certain that they weren't sleeping standing up. and i will always have a soft spot in my heart for travis, but i have the sinking suspicion that they may have inadvertently initiated the disillusionment with the glasgow music scene by releasing the politically-charged, musically-narcoleptic 12 memories, which sucked a lot of the cool out of their own reputation as well. (although maybe i should cut them some slack, as fran healy was wearing this hat at the time, which surely suggests some sort of psychotic episode in the offing.) all of the hipsters or the scenesters - or whatever kind of 'ster was popular at the time - turned their gazes from glasgow and went looking for a new undiscovered european town to devour.

this is when everyone realised, at the exact same moment, that sweden existed.

i'm not sure where this columbus-style discovery of stockholm and gothenburg began. but all of the sudden, every exciting new band or musician i heard about was hailing from sweden. (to the extent where i'm going to have to assume that some of them were lying about their country of origin, just to jump on the hey-i'm-from-sweden-please-give-me-a-record-deal-thanks bandwagon.) the hives. the soundtrack of our lives. jens lekman . the shout out louds. peter bjorn and john. the reincarnation of robyn. the knife. el perro del mar. pelle carlberg. irene. sambassadeur. (that's all i can think of right now. although, interestingly enough, i just found out that there's a swedish band called "wan light," named after an old orange juice song - which may cause some bending in the space-time-glasgow-sweden continuum.) this led people to think more fondly of the cardigans, remember the concretes, and conveniently forget about ace of base. it was a very good year to be an indie kid. (but only because "indster" never quite caught on.)

so now i'm wondering - when we've finished chowing down on sweden, who's going to be next? prague? kosovo? kyrkyzstan? the possibilities are endless. i'd be interested to see if anyone else has a hypothesis, vote, or prophetic dreams regarding what the next city might be.

but in the meantime, you can rest assured that any linked bands in this entry are most assuredly not hein. (they would have a "jls gives it a Not Hein" stamp on them if i had one... come to think of it, why don't i have a stamp like that?) so check them out, and enjoy those talented swedes before the talent faery takes off for greener pastures.

(hmm... iceland??)