One minute Sweden’s sweeping pop sweethearts, Mixtapes and Cellmates were trading faintly awkward and tricksy electronic beats and bristling with more static than a balloon rubbed for several minutes on a woolly jumper and the next they’re trading the kind of licks from commonly associated with prickly guitar bands like Editors and foaming with the fury of a tempest-tossed British Sea Power. But it’s still implausibly gorgeous.
January saw release of single, ‘Soon’ – a tumultuous and kinetic force of nature that twinkles as brightly a bagful of magic dust and gives you the kind of giddy feeling you get when opening your Christmas presents and April saw them follow it up with ‘Rox’- an equally broad-spectrum prescription of ebullient, rainbow power-pop and tumultuous, drum thumping, fret-thrashing, jaw-dropping atmospherics – a cross between the Shout Out Louds and New York’s Asobi Seksu.
They were on the verge of breaking up but now they’re not, their internal problems finally being resolved after a blistering five-day stint in the band’s Grondal Studio in Sweden. The result is ‘Rox’ – recorded live and likely to leave you a quivering, naked but quietly satisfied wreck.
Check out ‘Soft Eyes’. Pure pop bliss.