It's Friday, the sun is (almost) shining, and it seems like a good day for a bumper selection of new Nordic music, covering every style and genre we can manage. We'll start off with the Swedish band 'Gentle Ivanhoe Death Skulls' that we wrote about late in 2017 (was it really that long ago...?), and write music in a psychedelic shoegaze style, where the appeal to me is simply the great sound that the guitars, drums and assorted instruments make.
Straight form the start of their new single 'Cedric' you can hear that influence from bands like the 'Jesus and Mary Chain' and others from a similar era, and the thing I like about 'Gentle Ivanhoe Death Skulls', other than the name, is that they have this ability to write really good pop melodies, delivered by underplayed vocals, whilst the guitars plough on with their slightly distorted visions. It somehow all comes together in a warped way, and as I discovered last night it's a perfect track to turn up loud in the car as you're driving through the UK countryside just as the sun is setting.
This is 'Cedric':
Now these guys were supposed to have an album released at the end of the year, but I can't find it on Bandcamp, so we'll try and find out when that's being released - maybe you can get it in Scandinavian countries, but the UK is being cut off from new music releases to teach it a lesson for the lunacy of Brexit...