Swede Party

What's up with Sweden and awesome music? Lykke Li, Shout Out Louds, Jens Lekman, The Hives, and The Sounds. The only thing that might be better is Swedish softcore, but that's another topic for another time.

In the same Nordic, fish eating, flaxen haired and all around great tradition is Erik Hassle, a pop singer who makes some pretty great tunes.  Normally I'm not a big fan of the whole pop singer/songwriter deal but I really like Erik.  His voice has a different, unpolished quality to it but still comes out strong with emotion.  It also probably helps that he has insane geometric red hair a la Sideshow Bob and is so pale he almost translucent.  His album isn't out here yet, but the single for the song "Hurtful" is available on iTunes and the earliest video the song is below.  Following it are two more videos where he covers "Solsbury Hill" and "Nothing Else Matters" (my favorite) which I think show off his chops best. He has a lot of these really cool impromptu-esqe covers on youtube so check them out.

His songs also seem to get remixed in a fantastic way nearly everytime someone gives it a go (same thing with Friendly Fires). Its pretty hard to find a bad remix of one of his songs, or even decide what's the best, but you'll find three below that I enjoy the most.

I have no idea what a Penguin Prison is, but if they play this music there I'm booking a ticket down south to stomp on some of those happy-feet bastards until they throw me in. That's how good this is.


Via con dios amigos.

(Please note - I had to take down the links to the youtube videos because the blog cops didnt check the links and thought they were downloads, not youtube links.  So fuck it you had enough time anyways.)