Shout Out Louds - A pop melancholy

“When we go out dancing I don’t want to be bothered

just want to be bothered with real love“

How many wonderful things has Sweden given us over the last ten or fifteen years? And how many still remain hidden, like true treasures, within the borders of this Scandinavian country? The answer to both questions is probably the same: a lot. Some have managed to break out of their national borders, taking their music around the world, whether in the indie-pop scene (acts like Jens Lekman or the Sambassadeur) or in various other scenes, as with the garage rock of Hives first and then Mando Diao. Some have perhaps made it by sparking a genuine smash hit (think of “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn & John) or instead by betting on their own collective, like the I’m From Barcelona or the Those Dancing Days. On the other hand, there are also groups that, despite excellent reception, struggle to cross the waters of the Baltic Sea; take the Billie The Vision & The Dancers for example, whose last European tour dates back to 2009 despite a very good latest record. Finally, there are those who get noticed late, sometimes after several months, as with their Icelandic “cousins” Of Monsters And Men, whose album was released at home, to great success, in September 2011, and only reached the rest of the world in April 2012; other times, though, it takes years, as was the case with Shout Out Louds.

From Sweden to the world

The story of the Swedish band begins in 2001, and it's the same old story shared by thousands of other groups: two longtime friends, in this case Adam Olenius and Ted Malmros, meet up for a drink and decide to start a new band together. A few days later Carl von Arbin joins them, while Eric Edman and Bebban Stenborg come on board in 2002, the year that saw the recording of the first EP, 100 Degrees, which contained what would later become the core of their first album: Howl Howl Gaff Gaff. The record was released in Sweden in the summer of 2003, the same year that saw the light of one of the finest Swedish pop records of the last decade: "Lesser Matters" by Radio Dept. That coincidence, however, didn't affect the album's reception, which, being less ethereal and more direct than the Radio Dept debut, went on to achieve huge success at home: it was the start of the journey that would take Shout Out Louds' music to nearly every corner of the globe. For that to actually happen, though, it would take a little longer: the five embarked on a joyful national tour and the following year released another EP, Oh, Sweetheart; at the end of 2004 came the call from Capitol Records, determined to bring the band across the ocean. So the debut "Howl Howl Gaff Gaff" was reissued, with changes to the tracklist, turning out to be, by the band's own admission, a collection of songs from their early years of activity; and it's in this form that we came to know them in Italy too.

This fact made the record's distribution considerably easier: what we have here is essentially a potential singles collection, the fruit of years of work, handpicked as the best of the band. It goes without saying that the album hits the mark immediately, because Shout Out Louds offer the audience a formula that's hard to get wrong: tremendously catchy songs that trigger the instinct to move and let loose on the dancefloor, full of nods to earlier records, yet always with a personal touch that makes them unique within the indie-pop landscape. The album opens with a memorable one-two punch: the synth-tastic, upbeat "The Comeback" and the more intimate "Very Loud", which aims straight for the heartstrings (“Little by little/ You’re gonna hear me cry/ Hear me cry why?”); from there on it's smooth sailing, drawing on guitars reminiscent of Strokes or Built To Spill (the "Keep It Like A Secret" era) as a sonic reference point, and the rhythms and rhymes of Stuart Murdoch and his Belle & Sebastian as the emotional one.

From this blend of styles come tracks like "Please Please Please" or "100°", pop gems that are practically impossible to listen to without reacting, or touching moments like "Go Sadness", all marked by the same high quality. Among the declared influences are also Cure, whose echoes come through clearly in "There's Nothing", from the guitar riff to the vocals, while the closing stretch of the record leans toward more rock-oriented sounds: from the almost punk rhythm of "Hurry Up Let's Go", propped up by frantic handclapping and obsessive electronic sounds, through the more traditional indie-rock of "Shut Your Eyes", to the closing 8 minutes of "Seagull", with its hammering pace and its few circling lines clashing against the sweetness of the flute, brushing marginally against psychedelic moments.

Disturbed by true love

Continuing the string of releases that has kept them constantly active since 2002, the Swedish band put out in 2006 the not-exactly-memorable EP Combines, featuring the unreleased "I Meant To Call" and four remixes of tracks from their debut album. Meanwhile Ted Malmros, who together with his brother already handles all of Shout Out Louds' videos, directed the video for "Young Folks", the earworm hit from the third Peter Bjorn and John album, and it would be none other than Björn Yttling who produced the second album by Adam Olenius's band. 2007 is a year of changes: aside from the new "director" already mentioned, the band signed to Merge and made their second album, Our Ill Wills, which came out on 25 April in Sweden, at the end of May in Europe and in September in the United States. But what changes above all is the attitude of a band that, on their first record, had energetically celebrated pop music: what's most affected by this new emotional state is the sound itself, darker, more introspective, reflecting the themes running through the record. There's talk of broken love, of distressing situations, even in the more upbeat moments, such as "Time Left For Love", where we find ourselves facing tragic lines: "I lost all my friends in an accident/ I couldn't believe what happened".

So don't be fooled by the uptempo opening (relative to the rest of the album) of "Tonight I Have To Leave It", the first single and one of the few points of contact with "Howl Howl Gaff Gaff": within just a few songs, you'll find yourself immersed in the record's dark atmosphere. Once the "headache" on the parents' couch ("Parents Livingroom") has worn off, "You Are Dreaming" brings out all the disappointment felt and the inability to forgive: it's as if the optimism of their early days has suddenly vanished, leaving the protagonists with no apparent hope. Olenius's vocals increasingly take on the character of a Nordic Robert Smith, while Bebban Stenborg's vocal parts gain a more important role, taking center stage on the soft ballad "Blue Headlights" and appearing more generally throughout the record. The second single doesn't even try to mask this web of melancholy, skillfully woven by Björn Yttling's production, in which we now find ourselves thoroughly entangled; the six minutes of "Impossible" once again tell us of a love now gone, "I don't want to feel like it's an end of a summer", sings Olenius. And it's as if summer really has ended for Shout Out Louds: not even the few over-the-top moments, like the handclapping on "Normandie", manage to bring back any sunniness.

The journey, a recurring theme across several tracks, always carries the connotation of fleeing from someone or something, whether it's Olenius leaving, again in "Normandie", or, as in "You Are Dreaming", someone moving away from him. "Our Ill Wills", unlike its predecessor, is far more cohesive and carefully crafted, the sounds are clean, and it's clear that it was built around a very precise compositional idea; if "Howl Howl Gaff Gaff" is a collection of songs born in different ways and at different times, the sophomore Shout Out Louds album brings a specific period of their career and personal lives sharply into focus.

What I am, what I was, and what I'll always be

By this point the Stockholm band is a well-established reality: their pop songs have brought them to a wide audience, helped in no small part by the use of their catchiest songs in hugely popular, widely watched TV series (The O.C., One Tree Hill), films and video games. In 2009, for the first time in six years, no new material was released, with the group busy touring the world and playing some of the biggest festivals around. Written mostly by Olenius in Australia and recorded in Seattle, Work came out the following year in late February, with yet another change at the production desk: this time they brought in Phil Ek, the American producer who had already worked with Fleet Foxes, Band Of Horses, Built To Spill and Shins. If this seemed like a clue to yet another change of direction for the Swedes, the first single, "Walls", leaves little doubt: released as a free download, it's a piano-built track, in a constant crescendo where new elements keep being added bit by bit, but without ever reaching the impact or the almost dancefloor-ready rhythms that had characterized the lead singles of their previous records. Ek's work on this record is meticulous and precise, every guitar, every vocal line is always exactly where it should be, polished down to the smallest detail; the producer skillfully steers Shout Out Louds toward a new sound, if you will a more "classic" one, not necessarily bound to the pop conventions that had defined them up to that point.

With the synths set aside, the songs are built around piano or guitar lines, with Olenius's voice sounding cleaner compared to the urgent rasp of "Howl Howl Gaff Gaff" or the anguish of "Our Ill Wills". It can undoubtedly be called the band's most mature work, reaching a level of cohesion between tracks that had been missing on previous records; artistic maturity and personal rebirth for the group, after the pessimism of the second album. All of this comes through in the lyrics too, where you can sense the desire to lift their heads up again after the dark times, with a clear self-awareness, sometimes displayed through irony ("1999"), other times more directly: "Cause if you think I'm slowing down/ No, I'm not slowin' down" from "Throwing Stones". Unlike its predecessors, "Work" is a grower: it gets under your skin slowly, without lacking catchy rhythms, winning you over with the charm of simplicity: the track that best embodies this is "The Candle Burned Out", a slow psych crescendo ready to explode in its finale.

Despite some clear influences, both old, like Cure (will they ever shake that comparison?) on "Fall Hard", and new, like the folk-leaning "Throwing Stones", the third chapter in the Shout Out Louds story is the band's most personal in terms of sound; a happy epilogue to a hypothetical trilogy that has seen them grow both as musicians and as people.

A new decade in full color

Time is a relative concept, as we know: "Ten years is a very long time when you're young." These are the words with which Bebban Stenborg comments on the years that have passed since the start of their adventure, born in Sweden, that has taken them to stages across half the world. A band that was supposed to be called Luca Brasi, just like the character from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, but had to change its name because a group with that name already existed (luckily for us, we're inclined to say). Shout Out Louds wrapped up the "Work" tour in October 2011, after which they vanished from the scene: they shut themselves away in the studio to work, back home in Sweden. For the very first time, the new songs were composed collectively, blending Olenius's songwriting with Stenborg's; the production, too, would be handled entirely by the band itself, with the openly stated wish to satisfy, above all, themselves.

Optica is built on two fundamental components: time and light (understood as a natural element). What light means to a Scandinavian is hard to grasp for anyone who doesn't live in those places, and it's closely tied to the very idea of time. During the dark months, the lack of light warps human perception, eroding that sense of time rooted in simply observing natural phenomena like sunrise and sunset. People come to rely solely on physical cues (sleep, hunger) alongside the obvious help of technology: that's why the return of light is awaited by everyone with such impatience. The return of light also lets Nordic people reclaim the flow of time, steering them back toward a more "human" existence.

Against this backdrop, Shout Out Louds conceived and recorded “Optica”, an album of light and shade, an expression of the desire to step out of the dark and start seeing the world in full colour again. The path they've taken is the one already mapped out by its predecessor “Work”: a mature pop sound, built on refined melodies and meticulous arrangements, while always trying to keep that catchy streak that defines their work. Much more influenced by 80s sounds, the Swedes' fourth album opens with what's by now their classic nod to the Cure (“Sugar”), touches on smiths-esque sounds in a few spots (“Circles”), and gets reacquainted with the synths that had been set aside on the previous record. The singles chosen to launch the album – “Blue Ice”, “Illusions”, “Walking In Your Footsteps” – aren't as striking as their predecessors, though they still retain a certain catchiness, while the disco atmospheres of “14th Of July” and the glorious march of “Chasing The Sinking Sun” stand out. The latter harks back strongly to the “Our Ill Wills” era, along with “Hermila”, the only track sung by Bebban Stenborg and a reflection of that melancholic aura that never seems to want to leave the five from Stockholm.

2013 will be a year of celebration for Shout Out Louds: ten years in the business is a milestone to be proud of, a decade spent staying true to themselves and consistent, during which they've earned the almost unconditional respect of those who, having followed them since the start, have been able to watch their journey all the way to maturity. "Optica" won't be their best work, but it has the merit of carrying them unscathed into a new decade of music, putting the band in a position, to quote Bebban Stenborg again, "to face everything waiting for us out there, in the light, in full color."