On the surface, Sweden is a land of crystal lakes, rolling rivers and snow-capped mountains, with lots of happy blond people enjoying the country's famed social welfare and progressive government. But it's also a nation perilously deprived of sunlight much of the year. Perhaps underneath the shiny, happy exterior there looms a deep darkness in the country's soul.
The Cardigans are nothing if not a Swedish band. Formed in 1992 in the strict Lutheran town of Jönköping and then transplanted to the southern metropolis of Malmo, the young five-piece make music that on first listen sounds like the brightest, cheeriest Pop ever to come out of Sweden - a country, mind you, that unleashed both ABBA and Ace of Base onto the world.
The band's first U.S. release, early 1996's Life (actually a compilation of their first two Swedish albums, Emmerdale and Life), is a sort of time warp into a hyper-Pop dimension, a half-imagined past where innocence and artifice skip innocuously hand in hand. Life's cover features lead singer Nina Persson - smiling widely and dressed in her cutest skater's outfit - beaming Scandinavian beauty, while inside she sings gleefully of pure and simple love ("Carnival"), teen escapism ("Daddy's Car") and Alice-like soirées ("Gordon's Gardenparty"). Life's music - an all-analog cocktail of light Jazz guitar chords, finger snaps, tambourines, flutes, organs and muted horns - sounds straight out of the Burt Bacharach songbook, and the band's easy listening tendencies got them pegged as part of the cloyingly sweet and heavily ironic lounge revival.
The truth is, The Cardigans are not nearly as sugary as they first seem and they don't know anything about any martini-swilling fads. Listen carefully to Life and you'll notice there's something rotten in the state of Sweden. When Perrson lilts her gorgeous melodies, her words are not always full of fluff and levity. Sometimes the lyrics are much more grounded in reality and self-awareness. On "Sick & Tired," for instance, she's sings, "Sick and tired and homeless/With no one here to sing for/Tired of being weightless/For all these looking good boys."
On the phone from Malmo, Cardigans bassist and main lyricist Magnus Sveningsson admits to his band's covert operations.
"I really hope we can fool listeners to think we only play happy songs," he says. "I hope people will like the chorus but maybe the third or fourth time they listen to a song they'll realize the lyric wasn't as happy as they thought. We like to hide things beneath the surface. You have to have some dirt in the music."
The most direct manifestation of The Cardigans' dark underbelly is the guilty pleasure they derive from covering Black Sabbath songs in their own mellow pop glaze. Life features an icy organ-driven torch-song version of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," while the group's latest release, First Band on the Moon, contains a take on "Iron Man" that's closer to Portishead's Trip Hop than Ozzy's Heavy Metal. Far from being The Cardigans' idea of postmodern irony, the band's Sabbath fixation is sincere: It's part tribute to a favorite band and part musical challenge.
"It's pretty far from being a joke," Sveningsson says. "We really love the songs and wanted to rearrange them enough so they sound like original Cardigans songs. (Songwriter and guitarist) Peter (Svensson) worked like hell to rearrange the songs. He took away the heavy riffs, which are the first signs of the original, but kept the melodies, which are so strong. So the songs were still alive."
The Cardigans' Black Sabbath covers, in fact, will tell you more about where the band is coming from than any Burt Bacharach or lounge kitsch reference.
"I'm actually the only one who owns a Burt Bacharach album," Sveningsson claims. "And since I don't write the music, it has never been an influence."
Instead, you're more likely to find records by the Scorpions or Iron Maiden in the band's record collection. Both Svensson and Sveningsson, the group's founders, were devout hard rockers before Svensson learned Jazz chords at music school and Sveningsson discovered The Cure on MTV Europe. Still, deep scars from their Metal days remain.
"I think we all prefer a decent Pantera song instead of Burt Bacharach," Sveningsson says. "I've got a couple of easy listening albums, and a couple of tunes are really nice, but I think it's a bit much sometimes, a bit too sweet. I think we're too much hard rockers to really fit in that scene."
Sveningsson credits Life's undeniably light retro-Pop sound to their producer Tore Johansson, who saw potential in the band's straight-forward pop songs and infused them with glamour and style.
"When we came down to Malm, we were extremely fresh, 19 or 17, and Tore is 15 years older than I am," he says. "Tore felt we had something special but needed a sound. We didn't have a really clear picture of how we'd like to sound, and what he did with our songs was great."
Great, perhaps, but not necessarily a true picture of the band's personality. That's why with First Band on the Moon The Cardigans take a half-step away from their cute and cuddly reputation. While it's still unabashedly melodic pop - enough to have landed them on the U.S. charts and MTV playlist (with their hit "Lovefool") - the record is much less retro and less stylized than Life.
"On the new album we decided to have a bit more earthy sound, not as many additional musicians, and to create stronger sounds on bass, guitar, drums and keyboards instead of having bits of flute or trumpet or whatever," Sveningsson says. "Life was a bit too much sometimes."
As the band has toured the world (apparently they're huge in Japan) and tightened as a live unit, inevitably they developed a more traditional Rock sound. According to Sveningsson, Svensson and drummer Bengt Lagerberg have taken to performing Hard Rock again during the band's soundchecks - there's even talk of a Metal side project - and Svensson's songwriting has turned toward the spare Alternative Folk sounds of Red House Painters or Palace.
Not to worry, says Sveningsson, the band will continue to create very nice Pop despite themselves.
"We try to sound really really tough (on First Band on the Moon)," Sveningsson says. "We did really wild things with the guitars. But in the end we just sound like The Cardigans. Quite sweet."
THE CARDIGANS play Bogart's July 14.
CityBeat, Issue 3, Vol. 33; July 3-9, 1997
Back to articles from 1997