Love is all from Left: Fredrik Eriksson, Markus Gorsch, Johan Lindwall, Josephine Olausson, and Nicholaus Sparding
Love Is All
Issue #30
The noisy pop stars discuss spontaneity, international success, and the cold Swedish winter
By John Everhart
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:08pm
Embodying the shambolic, cut-up aesthetic of reckless outsider art noise-pop acts like Essential Logic, the Raincoats, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and Delta 5 — with a dash of Roxy Music’s sheen thrown in for good measure — Sweden’s Love Is All makes beautifully erratic music. Initially releasing a series of 7-inches for myriad labels never intended for inclusion on a full-length, the band relented and culled many of these tracks for their debut LP, the superb Nine Times That Same Song, released on What’s Your Rupture? in the U.S. in early 2006 and Parlophone throughout Europe.
The production acumen exhibited on these tracks is astounding, laden with copious layers of luscious reverb. This can be credited to the mixing of Comet Gain’s Woodie Taylor, whose similarly-minded band is a longtime favorite and influence on Love Is All. “Woodie brought in reverb and distortion,” says singer Josephine Olausson, who previously fronted the indie-pop act Girlfriendo with current LIA bandmate, guitarist Nicholaus Sparding. “He sort of invented our sound, which isn’t the way it usually goes. We weren’t involved at all, just sent him the files, and when we got them back they sounded completely different. It was just perfect.” Tracks like the woozy, gently surging mid-tempo ballad “Felt Tip” and the serrated guitar and saxophone mélange of scorchers “Spinning & Scratching” and “Talk Talk Talk” attest to this, sounding like the Shangri-Las if Phil Spector had recorded them in a tin studio.
Strangely, the band derived its initial buzz almost solely from their reputation as a formidable live act. They largely eschewed the polish of their records, opting instead for volume and intensity. Of this assessment, Olausson scoffs, “Well, it’s louder and faster and messier live. More things can fail when they’re live, and they usually do, especially when we’re in the States, using borrowed and rented gear.” The audience at one of the band’s first NYC gigs at Don Hill’s in late 2005 didn’t seem to mind. Even Olausson remembers it fondly, “It was brilliant. We were used to playing to 20 people in Sweden, most of them friends, and here we were, in New York for the first time, playing to like 200!”
With their popularity burgeoning in the U.S. and in Europe, the band is experiencing a pressure new to them: that of expectations. Their deal with Parlophone in Europe has even allowed them to quit their jobs to focus on music full time. “It’s different now,” Olausson says. “What we need to do for our next record is to stay in Gothenburg and not read papers or blogs and just do what we do.” She also
thinks Sweden is good because it’s isolated, especially compared to the U.K. “Gothenburg is so remote,” she says. “Reading about who’s cool this week in the NME can make you really paranoid. So in that way, it’s really good. And it rains a lot and is dark in the winter, so you want to be inside, recording ideally.”
And what can we expect from their next album? Olausson says she wants to be private about LIA’s plans, though she knows they’ll work with Taylor again. “I’m scared of it becoming formulaic. I want to keep it like it was before, just spontaneous like it was when we did Nine Times” she says. “I admire the Fiery Furnaces because people might like the first thing they put out and be completely alienated by the next thing they put out. They do what they feel like doing only because they like it musically, and that’s what I’d like to see us continue to do.”
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more