The People’s Record: Club 8’s Attempt to Thread in New Waters

The eclectic duo from Sweden experiments and comes up with a winning record

Among Swedish indie pop acts, Club 8 is known for combining electronic dance, acoustic, dream-pop, and trip-hop among others into heart-tugging melancholic melodies and lyrics. Listening to their latest album, The People’s Record, one would be tempted to think that Club 8 is Johan Angergard’s own lab to experiment on various music genres and incorporate these genres to the band’s brand of Scandinavian indie pop.

The People’s Record, the band’s 7^th album, is a further, bold step and perhaps an ongoing testament towards that musical experimentation. Gaining influences from Western African, Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban beat for this album’s sound, songwriter Angergard and singer Karolina Komstedt sound very different from their last two records, yet are still able to keep, or rather slip in their trademark Swedish indie-twee pop in their music. Here, Komstedt’s familiar angelic voice still lingers, singing, chanting to the backdrop of a glorious, buoyant, danceable African beat orchestrated by Angergard.

It starts out with “Western Hospitality”, a stomping piece of energy whose beginning riff resembles that of the Smiths’ “Barbarism Begins At Home”, and which carries the overall bouncy mood of the album. “Isn’t That Great” and “Shape Up!” and the chanting “Dancing with the Mentally Ill” continue the lively beat, and then “My Pessimistic Heart” follows to end the first half of the album. The rest of the album sounds more or less the same with the first five songs, with “Back To A” and “Be Mad, Get Ill, Be Still” proving to be the better tracks here.

Club 8 has established themselves to be one of the most consistent faces of the current indie-twee pop scene, but has shown diversity and versatility in doing so. This record is proof of that, a succinct 37 minutes of engaging light pop record from a duo unafraid to test new waters.