Incredible! Great performance by A Camp tonight. Will give full review along with pictures and video tomorrow.
Spinner has an exclusive preview of A Camp’s new release “Us and Them” a cover of Pink Floyd. It will be released June 9th on ITunes, but here it first here.
Check it out here.
The Denver Post interviewed A Camp recently.
Cardigans’ singer off to Camp
By Ricardo Baca
Denver Post Pop Music Critic
Nina Persson enjoys being in a band with her husband.
With piercing, blue eyes and the skin of Scandinavian porcelain, Nina Persson is a beautiful woman. But the Swede’s most stunning attribute is her voice, the sleepy soprano that took her band the Cardigans to multiplatinum success.
While the Cardigans are on hiatus, Persson’s other band, A Camp, is seizing the spotlight with “Colonia,” its second record in eight years.
Like that of the Cardigans, A Camp’s music is built around Persson’s honey-coated vocals. The men surrounding her in this band are fellow Swede Niclas Frisk and Nathan Larson, who is Persson’s husband and the former guitarist for Shudder to Think. The band is touring North America as a five-piece, and it’ll play the Bluebird Theatre on Saturday.
“I felt that we had established such a strong sound in the Cardigans,” Persson said earlier this week. “And that’s great. I don’t think they should be the place for me to experiment with my own music, and that’s why (A Camp) was needed.”
A Camp’s music is considerably more varied than that of the Cardigans. “Colonia” contains memorable pop moments (“Stronger Than Jesus”), sentimental rock jams (“My America”), chamber pop-styled songs (“Love Has Left the Room”) and bright lullabies (“The Crowning”). “Colonia” almost feels like an indie-rock record, with its smart instrumentation and sprawling nature, but there are also some serious, radio-worthy hooks. We asked her to talk about her bands and A Camp’s all-covers EP coming out Tuesday.
Q: How does it work, being in a band with your husband, Nathan?
A: It works really well, actually. As long as we’ve been together, we’ve always worked together, so the big difference now is that we’re touring together. This is the first time we’ve gone on tour together. I don’t know that I would recommend it to everyone, because it could be a disaster. But it works well for us.
Q: Has it changed your relationship at all?
A: Not really. We have to be aware that we don’t become a weird awkward unit among other people. People need to know that they can talk with us individually — and that’s something we were aware of in the studio as well.
Q: Why such a long break between your first and second CDs?
A: I did two Cardigans records in between, and we also toured those records. We would have done a record earlier if we had been able to come up with the time, but we couldn’t.
Q: Will we have to wait another eight years for the next A Camp record?
A: We can’t wait another eight years — that would be devastating.
Q: Will you guys ever release the first record in the U.S.?
A: We have it in our contract that it will come out after “Colonia.” Right now we can’t even sell it on the road, and we play a lot of the songs on the first record in our live show.
Q: And what of the Cardigans? Are you all still a band?
A: We’re just on hiatus. We tend to do this.
Q: You all are releasing an EP of covers next week, and I was hoping you could tell me why you chose the songs and artists you did. Let’s start with Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”
A: We’re all Pink Floyd fans, and we listen to a lot of their music. The song felt like a song that could be an A Camp song musically and rhythmically. We had also just embarked on these new aesthetics where we wanted to be really massive instead of being minimalist, and we thought it would be a good song to take on.
Q: And what about David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging”?
A: You don’t hear this song so much, and we thought it was a good one to bring out. It also makes all the sense in the world to sing as a girl — sometimes being a woman and singing a song by a man brings out something interesting in a song.
Q: And Grace Jones’ “I’ve Done It Again.”
A: With “Colonia,” we played around with the idea of a time-travel theme, and we thought this song went along with that. “Time Bandits” was a movie we talked about quite a bit while covering this song.
The Vancouver Courier did an interview with Nina Persson from A Camp recently.
A Camp from an ex-Cardigan
Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, June 05, 2009
CAMP NOT CAMP
On a new EP, Nina Persson’s band A Camp covers David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging,” Grace Jones’ “Done it Again, and Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.” “I think the lyrics are timeless,” says the Swedish singer, reached at a Minneapolis tour stop, of the Floyd tune. Well, we’re not sure about that. But we are sure that Persson’s latest album with A Camp, Colonia, will please both fans of her former band the Cardigans (“Lovefool”) and bring some new ones into the fold. Reviews of A Camp’s current tour, with a lineup that includes Canadian Emm Gryner on keyboards, have been positive, too; at least one reviewer noted the singer’s “fierce” sense of humour. Sure, some people can’t resist the urge to shout their requests for Cardigans material. And, says Persson, she feels sad at not being able to accommodate them. A Camp plays Richard’s June 10. Tickets at the door.
Nina Persson and A Camp bandmates, at Richard’s June 10, hold a press conference defending the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”
January 28, 2009 performance from A Camp on Pop Cirkus.
There are some demo songs hanging out there from the Cardigans very early days.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on 3 of them. (simon says / celebration / fine (demo))
It appears that more of them have made it onto bootlegged EPs called “The Pursuit of Pooh” and “The World According To”.
The track list for “The Pursuit of Pooh” from 1992 is
1. Treasure
2. The rescue of the man next door
3. Pooh song
4. Dig my earth
The track list for “The World According to” from 1993 is
1. Rise & Shine
2. Happy Here
3. Wrapped
4. Hard
Someone on the Internet is selling them for unbelievable prices.
In any case, if you want to hear a sample click here and here.
The Philadelphia Inquirer does a preview of the A Camp gig.
The Philadelphia Daily News does the same.
The Boston Herald does a review of their gig in Boston.
The Windy City Times from Chicago does an interview with Nina and A Camp.