After a few teasers (being the singles ‘Iron Man’, ‘Tunis’ and ‘Falling the same way’), Dag Och Natt from Stockholm, Sweden have released their album titled ‘Years and years’.
Let me start by saying that I am positively biased here. I am myself European, so I grew up listening to a lot of music from Europe, even though obviously US music was everywhere and very dominant, but the point I am getting to is culture.
And just like I have a preference for German-based melodic metal and Scandinavian extreme metal, I have a soft spot for all things textural, pop, and electronic that come from Sweden.
There is obviously something in the culture of the Swedes that makes them have this sound. As someone from Southern Europe, I jokingly say that their music ‘sounds’ blue, white, grey, and ‘frosty’. As soon as I press play and I start listening to this album, there it comes again, that synesthesia that hits me every time I listen to something from up North, whether it is Jonna Lee or something more experimental and obscure.
Their music can easily be classified in general terms as indie pop/rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. Their arrangements are far above the average complexity of a typical shoegaze band, which, let’s be honest, is quite basic and relies heavily on the effects, much more than the musical parts themselves.
Not in this case! There is definitely a simplicity in the bass lines and drum parts, which drive the songs wonderfully with their straightforward and dry but not lofi sound (that is a nice change, there is a lot of lofi drum sounds in shoegaze it seems!) but the guitars, which are beautifully arranged, whether it is strumming, arpeggios or simple open chords are already musically solid enough to then really flourish and expand with the use of dreamy reverbs and delays.
The vocals are unpretentiously ethereal, not completely washed away in reverb (which is the case with some backing vocals, and that is beautiful), so it still feels like a more grounded audio experience.
Strangely enough, in some parts of the album, the band sounds a little bit like Jefferson Aeroplane; if they were taking completely different drugs, I can’t find a better way to describe it! Not that there is any hippie element, but the base for these songs is coming much more from classic rock than from more modern shoegaze sounds, at least that is the impression I am getting.
I would love a bit more variation in the songs, but I definitely enjoyed listening to this album from start to finish, while looking outside the window and daydreaming, and I highly recommend you do the same!
Written by Spiros Maus
