Club
8 - Spring Came, Rain Fell
 Artist:
Club 8
Title: Spring Came, Rain Fell
Catalog#: AHA!036
No longer available.
|
Tracks
on this CD: |
| We're
Simple Minds |
| Spring Came, Rain
Fell (Windows Media) |
| Spring
Song |
| Close
To Me |
| Baby,
I'm Not Sure If This Is Love (Windows Media) |
| The
Chance I Deserve |
| I
Give Up Too |
| Friends
and Lovers |
| Teenage
Life |
| Karen
Song |
| The
Girl With the Northern Soul Collection |
| We
Set Ourselves Free |
| |
|
|
"We started out as lovers and ended up as a band."-Johan Angergard/Club
8
We like our duos to be dating, don't we? There's always a story there, even if
we have to read into it past the point of comprehension. Maybe it's something
to do with bearing witness to potential heartbreak and dissolution. "Hey!
Look at that car crash of a relationship. Their minor-keyed sorrow makes me feel
that much better. And wasn't Rumours a great album?"
Is Club 8's new album Spring Came, Rain Fell, their second release in
a six-month period, the jumping-off-a-cliff cliff hanger we're waiting for? Evidence
in the positive: Johan's hair is a little longer, more disheveled. A surface
analysis to be sure but we have to start somewhere. The album title really couldn't
be more clear, but would Johan and Karolina really allow their collective subconscious
to be so overtly revealing? I could close my case by pointing out that halfway
through the album's journey we hear "Baby, I'm
Not Sure If This Is Love" before closing with the song "We Set Ourselves
Free," but let's look behind and beyond the album's
creation.
Two months into the release of 2001's Club 8, the band announced plans to deliver
another full-length album within weeks. In December 2001 they were to leave for
a three-month sojourn to Southeast Asia (it's always "sojourn" when
it's Southeast Asia) and wanted Spring Came, Rain
Fell to be out upon their March return to the Swedish homeland. Almost as
if to make their attic empty and walls bare before the new life could
begin.
Musically, Spring Came is a warm extension of the sounds and melodies
on
Club 8. Whereas the duo's first two efforts, Nouvelle and The Friend
I Once Had, are bouncier more upbeat affairs displaying some bossa nova influence,
Club 8 carves out, as the Seattle Weekly put it, "rainswept soundscapes
that linger like fog banks in February." Spring Came sits comfortably
on the same plateau. Peaking over the edge. Gently. Assuredly. Knowing what's
next, but keeping it to itself until the
episode when Johan and Karolina return.
Sure, this is a story. Likely past the point of comprehension.
Covering
the same ground as Camera Obscura (the twee group, not the scree
group, respectably), Sweden's
Club 8 develop casual moments, unfurling hushed dialogues like
intimate whispers between young lovers - like sitting in the
dark listening to Orange Juice wondering about good sex. Fitting
then, that Spring Came should be the work of ex-lovers in the
throes of a disjoining relationship. Multi-instrumentalist/songwriter/vocalist
Johan
Angergard and vocalist Karolina Komstedt began, "As lovers than became a
band," and it shows. The patient, languid arrangements compound a dearth
of heartfelt tenderness and warmth. Contrastingly, each subtle melody weaves
innately around a tense rhythm as if deeply affected by the history of its parent
composers. Emotionally congruous and stylishly designed, Club 8's complex sensitivity
compares favorably to an evening of stolen kisses. - The Big Takeover
"In one of the more startling and underrated reinventions in recent history,
former twee-pop mascots Club 8 have quietly retired their giddy dance tempos,
opting on their self-titled effort for a sort of quiet, pastoral tranquility
that baffled their ABBA-adoring acolytes. Now, a scant six months later, Club
8 broadens their scope with Spring Came, Rain Fell, by great leaps their
most mature and accomplished work.
Opening with a bass line lifted straight from Twin Peaks, Spring Came explores
the sad side effects of collapsing love and hopes long deferred. The record develops
photograph-slow, each song easing quietly into clarity rather than arriving crisp
and fully formed. But where Club 8 felt, at times, stifled by the group's
newfound seriousness, Spring Came moves past simple, somber tones into
outright musical maturity.
For the first time it feels as if Club 8 is writing songs instead of ditties.
Even decidedly uptempo numbers like the Cure-ish "The Chance I
Deserve" are deliberate and artful." -J. EDWARD KEYES Creative
Loafing-Atlanta
Drawing from various influences, from Leonard Cohen
to bossa nova, Club 8 is a reminder that Swedish music is not all about Ace of
Base. Straying from the previous album, Johan Angergard and Karolina Komstedt
set the mood with warm yet melancholy songs that hark back to their Scandinavian
culture.
Song entitled, "She Lives By the Water," "Love in
December," "The Sand and the Sea," and "Hope for
Winter" conjure up gray oceans and snow covered hills as the backdrop for
relationships gone bad. You find a friend in Karolina, because, for an hour,
no one else seems to know more about waiting for phone calls that never come
and boyfriends that drift away. Club 8 is the breakup music that you won't mind
hearing over and over again. -Jennifer Li, Venus Zine
Now that Bono and the Super Bowl have reinvested rock with the political, it
remains for someone to reinvent pop to be beautiful. What popular music needs
less of is girls wearing underwear over their pants, and a good deal less of
that ugliest of genres - post-grunge yowling. No, what is needed now more than
ever is idealist and sensitive teenagers dressed in black - the sort who carry
around second-hand copies of Baudelaire and dream of beauty so impossible that
parents, teachers and suburban cynics the world over deride the very concept
as utopian. Are these people depressed? Maybe. But when one considers what passes
currently for oppositional or alternative culture, depression is the only sensible
response. Pop can mean so much. Why on earth should people settle for
so little?
Thankfully, we have Club 8. You may have never heard of Johan Angergard (who,
alongside singer Karolina Konstedt, makes up this Swedish duo), but this has
very little to do with his ability and everything to do with the commodification
of popular music. With his previous band, Pop Race, and his other current band,
Acid House Kings, he has delighted fans of indie-pop music for the past decade
with a feyness so fashionable it makes pastiness seem the
height of male sexuality.
Spring Came, Rain Fell is the fourth release from Club 8, and it's the perfect
record to remind us how potentially beautiful pop (and life) could be. Unlike
so many indie-pop songwriters, Angergard doesn't confine himself within the limitations
of the genre - jingle-jangle followed by unimaginative shoegazing fuzzy guitar
fadeouts. Club 8 sings about love (fulfilled, unrequited, fleeting, teenage,
with a girl who has a Northern Soul collection) with music chosen to fit the
lyrics as deftly as a clotheshorse matches a tie to a shirt. Their influences
are noticeable more in their aesthetics than the sound; with their idols - Another
Sunny Day, the Pastels and the Smiths - Club 8 share a quaint and precious belief
that beautiful pop music can change lives.
There are other bands that cherish similar delusions, but Spring Came, Rain Fell
seems proof that none of their contemporaries have quite figured out Club 8's
secret recipe. -Colin Snowsell, Calgary Straight
Club 8's fourth album comes only a few months after their last, which ushered
in more laid-back, quieter era for the pop-obsessed duo of Karolina Komstedt
and Johan Angergard. Spring Came, Rain Fell is another collection of dreamy songs
centered around Komstedt's soft, sultry voice. Like their sonic cousins in Saint
Etienne, Club 8 meander between delicate guitars and slick synth melodies with
a noticeable jazzy influence of artists like Bebel Gilberto. Angergard produces
and writes all the material, which isn't a surprise, as he is quite the enigma
of the Swedish indie pop scene. However, with Komstedt by his side as Club 8,
his work has really found a groove. Spring Came, Rain Fell is a consistently
pleasing album, one where no individual tracks take the spotlight, a testament
to the songwriting talent. An excellent summer record, this is the audio equivalent
of eating something sugary sweet and getting a nice message at the same time.
-Rob Bolton, Exclaim
For former lounge addicts jonesing after the creamy dream-pop of the Cardigans
and St. Etienne, Sweden's Club 8 will go down like a NyQuil cocktail. Karolina
Kornstedt and Johan Angergard are practitioners of equal-opportunity heartbreak:
he plays polilte guitar and shimmery synths; she trills sweetly and looks icy
on the CD jacket. Together, they offer 12 gently rocking ruminations on love
and betrayal. "I Give Up Too" and "Teenage Life" are sort
of like Everything But the Girl sans folky earnestness or clubland fixation -
lush, airy, expansively pleasureable. -MM, Gear
|
|
|
| |
| THIS
WEEK'S TOP TEN |
01 Norma -- Book of Norma(more)
02 Soundtrack of Our Lives, The -- Communion (PRE-ORDER: SALEABLE NOVEMBER 25TH)(more)
03 Park Hotell -- Free For Friends(more)
04 Various -- Happy Sweet 16 Carrot Top Records(more)
05 Bubblegum Lemonade -- Susan's in the Sky EP(more)
06 Norma -- Norma 1 EP(more)
07 Baird, Meg -- Dear Companion(more)
08 Sigur Ros -- Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (PRE-ORDER: SALEABLE DECEMBER 9TH)(more)
09 Love Is All -- A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night (ON SALE)(more)
10 Mojo -- #181 (December 2008) [Magazine + CD](more)
|
|
|
