Label: 1/2 Special


I?m obsessed with all things Swedish, so I innocently bought this album thinking it would be yet another demonstration of why I should be so enamored with the Swedes. The cover art should have warned me. A two-dimensional picture in three colors; a house surrounded by yellow ground with flowers at perfect intervals: it looks like the marker drawings I did when I was 9. ?Tr?d, Gr?s, och Stenar? (pronounced 'Tread, Gress, Ock Steenar?) is one of the most absurd and hard-to-pronounce names I?ve ever heard, and its written in psychedelic bubble letters. The booklet inside is a conglomeration of pictures of the band, posters in Swedish to some of their concerts, and a long diatribe in English that must be from one of Thomas Mera Gartz? acid trips:

?In the center of Finsp?ng town, there was dancing. There was much rejoicing, waiting for the good lady Musica to let it out, the music lifting us all high above phony society and its false values. Wild, man, wild. The bushes planted in uptight rows rebelled in unison and tickled the tummy of the sky as it flowed in naughty naked nudity above us all.?

I like some prose, and I?ve done some acid, but combining prose and acid only seems to produce trite shit. Combining music and acid seems to have the same effect. Thus, I don?t really have much good to say about the music itself. ?Dibio? is bearable, maybe because it?s really short (1:39). But brevity doesn?t save ?Munfiol?, which is a two minute and fifty-three second mouth harp/violin duo with no aim or variation to it. The two thirteen minute songs ?Tidigt om Morgonen? and ?Drammen Export ? Sommarl?ten? are actually about six different songs in one, some of which have real potential, especially in the quieter parts where no one is droning. I wasn?t prepared to go without a bath for the week it would take to listen to the song ?Amithaba ? In Kommer G?sta?, so I had to abandon my attempt to review this album and take a shower. But I?m being hard on them. Maybe I?m spoiled by other bands (The Grateful Dead, for instance) that did this better, or maybe it?s just the lack of drugs in my system that makes it hard for me to appreciate them. 3/10 -- Eden Hemming Rose (25 May, 2005)