Because we’re so generous, we’ve decided to give you another first this week on our spankingly good MySpace Trawl. Last week we covered an artist whose didn't even make their MySpace page. It was all done by someone who we presume was locked up in their bedroom till the wee hours of the morning trying to convert you to their favourite band.
Whilst they did a good job doing so, all they needed to do was really let the people hear the music. This week we rattled our brains to better last week and this is what we've come up with – it's Dungen and their decidedly non-English Swedish psychedelic freakouts. After all, 0.2% of our readership comes from Sweden. 0.2%, this is for you.
If you’re musically turned on, you’ll know the wonderful Sigur Ros from Iceland. No, we don’t mean the supermarket which mum's apparently gone to, the country Iceland. What’s so different about Sigur Ros apart from coming from a cold country, you ask? Well, unlike nearly every band or artist who clogs up our chart; Sigur Ros don’t sing in English. Or Icelandic, for that matter. They've made up their own barmy language. We have no bloody idea what they're on about, and nor does anyone else. But hey, it sounds good to us! Sigur Ros have managed to get mass airplay on radio, their videos shown on various music channels and their music used in adverts or trailers for TV shows.
So that got us thinking. There must be some more people out there who don’t sing in English but produce some cracking songs. We trawled through MySpace and found this guy. Dungen. Hailing from Sweden, we were quite surprised to find out that Dungen wasn’t a busty blonde like Ulrika, but a hairy psych-rocker who doesn’t sing in English. Off-putting for some of you, we'd imagine, but not everyone has to speak the Queen’s English. God bless you Ma’am.
But for some bizarre reason – despite the fact he could be calling us all bedwetters for all we know – we really like the music of Dungen. It’s even catchy enough to sing along to, or at least make vaguely similar noises along to, anyway. Sadly, only two tracks have been uploaded onto his MySpace page but they're both crackers. The first track is called Panda. Yes, before any smartarse jumps in and tells us, there's every chance that Panda means the same thing in Sweden as it does in English – manky 10p fizzy drinks. What a small world we live in.
Panda begins with a quick pounding of the drums. Starting off slowly over the course of the first 25 seconds or so of the track they continue to bang away. Not sticking to any fixed pattern they continue to thump around until they meet a scattered guitar chord and the two match perfectly. All sorts of influences can be found throughout this track. Dungen is a very talented musician – his father, who was a fiddler, a violinist and a music teacher probably took great pride in teaching his youngster how to play an instrument. Rock, piano and folk influences also rubbed off onto him, either by dabbling around with the instruments themselves or by growing up listening to the music. Add to that the influences of listening to hip-hop when growing up as a kid as well as the world of sampling, you have a shaken-up mixture of completely different sounds which shouldn’t really work. When was the last time you heard a hip-hop track featuring the use of a fiddle? Well we know of one such use in another genre, but that’s for another Trawl, we think.
After hearing all of these wondrous sounds, Dungen – aka Gustav Ejstes – decided it was a good idea to just go back to the basics. And he did so. Using just guitar, drums, bass, keyboards and vocals he created his first album in 2001 – a vinyl-only release. It gained mass praise in the underground music scene. The sounds he makes can only be described as something different to say the least, combining rock, folk and psychedelic with a touch of the 1960s about them, this is the end result of Dungen’s sound. Whilst it sounds challenging enough to get your head round, remember all of the lyrics are sung in Swedish, giving you no clue of what’s being said.
If we’re being honest, this Trawl is probably our most difficult listen to date. But hey, that’s what music is all about isn’t it? Finding something totally different out there that's not just the same old repetitive crap that we get fed all the time from MTV.
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[story by Matthew Laidlow]