As a result of the coming-of-age of the 1980s generation, synthesizers, which were embarrassingly unfashionable a decade ago, are back with a vengeance to build out the high end of a huge share of today’s rock songs. Almost any band with the right haircut and a punk-funk-disco beat has a shot at radio airplay. This has led some of the snobbier quarters of indie fandom to turn their nose at most of these new New Wave acts, dismissing them as ‘80s revivalists who are cashing in on a predictably cresting wave of sentimentality that seems to follow any movement in pop culture by about twenty years. These people can successfully dismiss at least some of these acts, but not all.
The Sounds, you see, know what really made popular music in the 1980s fun: big, explosive pop hooks. “I know that on the last album a lot of people made comparisons with bands from the ‘80s,� says Sounds’ guitarist Felix Rodriguez, “I don’t think we have so much of the ‘80s sound on this album, but what we took from the ‘80s was that a lot of bands wrote really good songs. They wrote really catchy songs that got stuck in your head immediately.�
The Sounds certainly fit the bill. Like so many bands from Sweden before them, The Sounds write songs with choruses that burst from the speakers with energy. It is possible to reference everyone from contemporaries like Sahara Hotnights and The Hives back to The Wannadies, The Cardigans, and This Perfect Day, and even further back to Abba and Roxette (a serious guilty pleasure of this reporter) for evidence that the Swedes know their hooks. If The Sounds borrow from some well-known sources (and they do), it may be that they take the visual appeal of Blondie (due mostly to vocalist Maja Ivarsson, the band’s focal point) and mix it with the amped-up sound of The Cars or even Madonna with guitars. For all the ‘80s comparisons that have been leveled at the band, they don’t actually sound much like any band from that decade. They’re well aware of this.
“We know we are a fucking good band and our songs are good,� begins Rodriguez, blasting through the kind of pretentious false modesty that so many Amer-indie bands hold so dear. “We know what we have and we know what we can give. It’s about us.�
What they have is Dying to Say This To You, their sophomore disc and the first since 2003’s Living in America. When Living in America was released three years ago, indie was still recovering from a well intentioned yet somewhat ill advised scourge of garage-rock bands. For every White Stripes, there were three far-lesser bands (D4, The Datsuns, Division of Laura Lee) following in their wake. Living in America’s bright hooks and modern shades wound up foreshadowing the new wave of new wave, in which more dance floor friendly bands like The Killers and Franz Ferdinand would elbow the garage rockers out of the way. If The Sounds sounded a bit out of place in 2003, they sound spot-on for 2006.
“Three years ago, it was really hard as a guitar-based band that also had a keyboard to get songs on the radio,� says Rodriguez. “I was confused. I think we were a little ahead of our time. The Killers and The Bravery have played all over the states now and more bands are popping up with that kind sound with the guitars and keyboards.�
Recorded largely in San Francisco, with production work by Jeff Saltzman (The Killers) and additional touches courtesy of Adam Schlessinger (Fountains of Wayne) and James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins), Dying to Say This To You builds from the same template as the band’s debut, but expands its boundaries in the way any good sophomore record should. “We’d been getting a lot of interest from American bands, and we’d been on tour with American bands that influenced our stuff,� says Rodriguez. “We wanted to record our album with an American producer. What Jeff wanted to do was have the band sound a little bit more live. Bring a bit more live feeling into the record. And that’s exactly what we wanted as a band.�
“We wanted to have an opinion from someone like Adam and James,� continues Rodriguez. “They’ve both been in big bands. They didn’t produce or change or write anything, they just added some stuff.�
“We went on tour with The Strokes for like a month in the states,� adds Rodriguez, “and for me that was inspiring because I hadn’t been that interested before in writing melodies on guitar. I was interested in writing melodies on keyboard. But their music is really guitar-based and there are lots of great melodies, even on guitar.�
“A lot of songs on the last album had keyboards and guitars in the same song,� says Rodriguez. “We still have that, but we kind of wanted to separate the mix between keyboards and guitars. The songs with the guitar feeling have more guitar; the songs with more electronics have less guitar. We didn’t mix them so much as on the last album. The electronic parts have more electronic in them, the rock songs are more guitar based.�
The resulting album includes songs that sound like they could’ve been on the first album (“Queen of Apology,� “Tony the Beat,�) along with others that push the template a bit. The album’s opener, “Song With a Mission,� is a demand for credibility that’s paired with such a forceful call for a throwdown that it might as well be a hip-hop song - except, of course, that it’s actually an anthemic garage rocker. Similarly, the band took big diversions on songs like “Night After Night� and “Don’t Want to Hurt You.�
“It’s kind of like a duet,� says Rodriguez, of “Don’t Want To Hurt You,� a vaguely Human League-ish tune that’s one of the album’s highlights. “We wrote that song in San Francisco in the studio, one late night. We were sitting with a little laptop just programming beats. I don’t know how it happened but someone came up with the words “hurt you,� and someone came up with a melody, and I think we came up with it in one night, just as an experiment. I started to sing on it, and Fredrik {Nilsson, drummer} was like “say something with ‘hurt you’�. We tried to redo it, but it never sounded as good. I was adding some guitar on another song, and I remember I walked in and Jesper {Anderberg, keyboardist} was sitting and playing guitar and plugged the guitar straight into the computer with no amps or anything.
“Night After Night� exists on the album in two versions: a fast, dance-inflected number and a slow-paced, piano driven ballad that doesn’t feature any synthesizers. “The ballad version, we came up with that one late night,� Rodriguez explains. “We already had the fast version; we wrote the song in a rock way. And it was me and Jesper, and we thought we should have a song on the album that was a little bit down tempo, not so fast, like a ballad. We sat down at a grand piano and thought ‘Why can’t we just try to make a ballad with a song we already have?’ That song has great melodies and the lyrics and everything fit so for a ballad.
“That song, I think for me and everybody in the band, that song is the ‘original’, the ballad version,� adds Rodriguez. “It’s even better than how we wrote it in the beginning.�
If there’s a secret formula to the what makes The Sounds’ songs sound so infectious (and yes, I do challenge you to say that three times fast), it may be their ability to deftly balance the cool and the uncool at once, the way The Cars made ‘70s AOR fans stand up and pay attention to New Wave. “I think we get inspired by a band we don’t really like at all,� adds Rodriguez. “Like really cheesy, bad music. We went into a studio five or six years ago in Sweden. We recorded three songs and came home and got the demo and listened to it, and were like ‘I don’t like anyone like this, I hate it. This sounds horrible, let’s do the opposite.� I think sometimes we listen to bands and get influenced by bands we don’t really like.�
