The songs on this splendid CD were composed, recorded and self-released by The Slow Summits – a delightfully fully-formed four-piece indie pop band from Linköping, Sweden – between 2019 and 2022 – so this is not an album in the strictest sense; rather a beautifully cohesive collection of their potted releases to date, bound up and delivered by Pretoria’s glorious Subjangle Records. But while it is not formally their debut LP, it is as good an album as any you’ll hear this year, and something about it seems perfectly timed to me; perhaps it’s just because this summer, The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster is back on the road with his Swedish Band (led by Peter Morén of Peter, Bjorn and John fame) and the agreeable musicality of that band’s arrangements is echoed in this gorgeous release.
Fans of Forster will find much to love here – not just in the expert songcraft and the shared melodic sensibility but in the wry, intelligent, slightly detached lyricism. The Slow Summits confess that their songs are primarily about social, interpersonal and macro-political problems, admitting that, after all, “we are white middle-class men”,… and consequently, the songs here deal with matters as diverse as communication failure, capitalism, micro-aggressions and pseudo-intellectual arrogance. Between the lines, a vivid picture is painted, too, of local failures, indolence and idle pettiness. Sometimes, The Slow Summits sound delightfully short of patience with others. Sometimes with themselves.
The first track, ‘Spirit Of The Lyrics’, is a glorious, hilarious start. The band are loose and limber, stretching into a bouncy indie pop canter. At the same time, the vocals land somewhere between Forster and Morrissey, archly telling a tale of a singer whose “elegant monotone voice” thrills his audience despite his having no appreciation at all of his song’s meaning. “The spirit of the lyrics never entered your mind”, singer Anders Nyberg observes. The walking bassline, jangly guitar and a spirited backing vocal from Amelia Fletcher spiral towards a harmonically-heavenly, near-acapella coda that Jonathan Richman would be proud of, including the entreaty “And why didn’t you sing about your life? The words you sing don’t mean a thing, if you don’t comprehend the spirit of the lyrics. So write your own words from your heart, and it will all make sense”.
‘Regrets’, built around brittle, bright guitars and enlivened by many a Kevin Rowland-style sigh and a chuckle from Nyberg, observes dryly the frustrations of an argumentative relationship without once shifting the blame or masking over faults: “I was snide and made a lot of sense – to myself“, we hear. It would be easy to imagine Jarvis Cocker intoning the following line: “oh yeah, that really helps“. The song’s narrator is trapped mid-argument, half in love with his own cleverness, half aware he’s lost the plot. Not that he should carry all the responsibility: “Granted that I’m truly naïve in this special field, a forlorn amateur / But you seem fully determined to have me revealed as this whole dust-up’s auteur”. It’s a brilliantly self-deprecating look at a “holy war of words” which is “intersubjectively absurd”.
The whole record is just as charming, engaging, challenging and funny. ‘A Hit To Your Wallet’ throws darts at a listener who is self-medicating through retail therapy. Come off it, this slightly old-fashioned band seems to be saying: “Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine”. Knock it off “before it burns a hole in your capitalism-invigorating soul”. Lest they come over as judgy intelligentsia, the hilarious ‘Less Than Impressed’ is a full-frontal attack on academics obscuring meaning behind jargon, ending with a plea to “give us some meaning or give us your home address“. In ‘Then Again’, we meet the kind of man who’ll “correct you when you’re wrong, then […] teach you something valuable that you did know all along”. The best line comes at the end, the mansplainer dismissed! “Now! Dummy up!”.
I love this album. The Slow Summits know indie-pop intimately, playing with crisp momentum and feeling, and they’re bright chaps, exceptional lyricists. At times, they ease back on the social satire to reflect on life from a place between wit and melancholy, sincerity and irony, and usually, the conclusion is that a quiet life of squandered opportunities is… not too bad.
In ‘Time’s On Your Side’ I’m reminded of the song ‘Untouched’ on the excellent recent The Gentle Spring LP, where Michael Hiscock sings “Well, what can I say? / maybe I just chose to live my life another way / and maybe the fear held me back from year to year”. Here, Nyberg diagnoses a comparable lack of urgency: “I never took the stage / to make havoc at my secondary school”, he sings. On ‘Safe and Sorry’, he goes further:
“Never the world at my feet
No reason to be audacious
Never a knife in my teeth
And to my patron saint’s great bliss
At night, I kept out of fights”
But, at times, the fear is more intense: “This worrying thought / of things one should have done that I have not”.
Are we wasting our lives?
The Slow Summits aren’t – not making a record as lovely as this.
And happily, they know it. “Now time’s on your side”, Nyberg sings, “Waste it well. Smash every sign that says carpe diem!”
Written by Jonathan Shipley
