HOLOGRAMS - Forever

There's a kind of perverse pleasure to be had with "Forever", the second album by Swedish band Holograms, the only Scandinavians ever to land on Captured Tracks. It's hard to say exactly what happened to the Stockholm band between their debut and now, but it must have taken a staggering surplus of ego to convince them that, out of the thousand fragments of that first record, they could rebuild something that would finally give the group a defined identity, even while working from the same foundations.

It's not that a vision was missing before, clearly, but the new Holograms, still in search of a more articulate approach to their material, seem to have decided to treat the chaotic urgency of their debut as an anomaly, recalibrating their coordinates toward an equally urgent proposition, only this time fully framed and defined. The sharp edges of the debut are reworked into a better structured form, letting the decadence that the first album never quite brought into focus finally triumph. A post-punk sophomore album through and through, much like fellow countrymen INVSN managed to pull off, convincing both in its most concise, gut-punching tracks ("Flesh and Bone", "Meditations", "Laughter Breaks the Silence", "Rush") and when the band once again try to subvert the most classic canons by adding synths ("Luminous", "Wolves").

What finally emerges is the full potential and the portrait of a group that's "vintage" in look, in attitude, in its black-and-white imagery. "Forever" isn't nostalgic, and it doesn't paint the despair or the blurred rage of being twenty, even as it remains sympathetic to both. It's a cynical, sensual, disenchanted exaltation of the punk ideal, of the urgency hidden within its folds, emerging natural and effortless from the alchemy of these four young men.

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04/10/2013