Singles Round-Up Supplemental:

Those Dancing Days - Run, Run
(Wichita)

Logic dictates I should begin writing about my feelings for Sweden’s Those Dancing Days by trying to place them within the impossibly diffuse context of late ‘00s left-of-centre pop music, by trying to reflect / account for / sneer at the impressive snowball of blog/media hype they’ve managed to accumulate, or even by stomping my way straight into a typically dur-brained analysis of what I believe they’re trying to achieve with their music and the extent to which I think they succeed, but…. for whatever reason, I find myself unable to get an angle on any of that. As soon as my contemplation of this band goes beyond rote approval of the initial concept (five girls making great, pure, self-taught pop music with drums and guitar and keyboard etc.), as soon as I hear their actual * music *, they seem to become a cipher….. there’s really nothing solid I can grab onto to anchor who this band are, where they’re going, what they mean to the world – they seem almost transparent, and I don’t want to try to recklessly leap aboard their cloud and fall straight through it, if you know what I mean.

Because you see, all I’m certain of at this stage is that Those Dancing Days make me unreasonably, inexplicably HAPPY in a quite profound sense.

Not happy like, say, falling in love, or cradling a newborn baby, or headlining the Fillmore East alongside Miles Davis in 1969, or even happy like getting totally lost within a random radio play of ‘Into The Groove’ or ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Born To Run’. No, they make me happy more like…. eating a really nice sandwich. Or seeing next door’s cat doing something really funny outside the kitchen window. Or it being sunny.

All of their songs are pretty fantastic, if quite similar. All of them have different takes on pretty much the same combo of soaring chorus melodies, killer instrumental hooks and beautifully natural rockin’ feeling. I love how their singer sounds entirely unlike you’d expect the singer in a band like this to sound. She’s got a lovely, smoky, classically “good” voice that your mum & dad would probably appreciate. She manages to invest every song with a kinda intangible, wistful nostalgic feeling, without ever detracting from the group’s dedication to making big, anthemic pop. This odd synthesis renders things warm and woozy, simultaneously comforting and exciting. It’s a good feeling!

Rejecting punk/rock n’ roll’s two minute dogma, Those Dancing Days also seem to adhere strictly to the idea that a proper song should always be somewhere in the region of three minutes twenty. Which is probably what your mum & dad would feel to be classic, optimum pop song length too, should you manage to provoke an opinion out of them on the subject. But no one of their songs thus far is really THE one. Many seem to feel “Hitten” is THE ONE, but I dunno… I mean, it’s good, but it’s not substantially better than their other ones. ‘Run Run’ and ‘Home Sweet Home’ on this single, for example, are both equally brilliant. The latter in particular is great, taking the band as close to a rough, wild-eyed garage sound as they’ve ever dared go, with way-out organ, manic drumming and an absolutely delightful Swedish “1!2!3!4!” count-in… thus relegating it to b-side status apparently – ho-hum. Clearly neither song is ever going to change the course of anyone’s life, but they’d doubtless make fine soundtracks for any life-changing stuff that happened to be going on at the time, and like I say – sandwiches, cats, sunshine.

I think Those Dancing Days are a brilliant radio band, essentially. I know this because I heard them for the first and second times on the radio, and it was brilliant, like hearing Fleetwood Mac or Roxy Music is brilliant, only HOMEMADE, and thus punk, like The Raincoats, or The Gories. Super-brilliant!

Will Those Dancing Days establish themselves as the greatest pop band of our era, or will they retreat into MOR predictability and overproduced Radio 2 blanditude? Does it really matter? Is there even a difference?

At the moment, answering questions like that seems akin to fretting over whether or not next door’s cat is gonna win the cat show.

Those Dancing Days are here, and they are good. Don’t ask why.

Mp3>
Home Sweet Home

http://www.myspace.com/thosedancingdays
http://www.wichita-recordings.com/

Labels: pop, singles reviews, Those Dancing Days