Electric Boys frontman Conny Bloom is back with a new solo album sung entirely in Swedish. “Bloom born as Ulf Conny Blomqvist in Stockholm 1964, learned his trade in bands such as Road Rats and Neon Rose but found success and fame in the late 80’s as the centre of attention influential groove rock combo Electric Boys. Conny was also catapulted to success in the 00’s, when he played guitar for the Hanoi Rocks on their last three albums.”
As a solo artist though he’s doing something completely different, and on his last two albums part of that is singing in Swedish but musically two he’s in different territory – creating “storytelling folk rock with traces of psychedelia, funk and 60’s pop.”
Opening with ‘AB Maffiadojjor’ a funky, jazzy little number that crawls along nicely its certain this is no Electric Boys outing, it’s altogether different, more like imaginary soundtrack music for an age gone by. And whilst ‘Rulla på’ sounds like serviceable Pop with 60’s sheen as does ‘Skadad’ which follows, but is a bit more downcast, there’s nothing here that really grabs a fan of Bloom’s previous work until that is you get to the poppy and funky ‘Knegarjäntan å jag’ a song that is altogether janglier and livelier than anything that has proceeded it.
And that is kind of where you are left as a non Swedish speaker, all that can grab you is the music and in all honesty there are some moments here that hint at greatness but there’s also a lot of pop gloss and sheen. And whilst ‘Jag tror jag trollat bort mig själv’ has that atmospheric almost sitar-like opening that will have some remembering that first Electric Boys album its a song that refuses to Rock properly taking an avant-garde route, and yet it still remains the high point here for me.
We’re back to Pop for ‘Flyttkarl,’ but just when you expect that there’s not another rocker on here along comes one one but two highlight in the funky ‘Dubbelgig’ and the mid tempo rocker ‘Jag vill ha dig.’ There’s more jazzy rock as the instrumental ‘Gånglåt från kärrträsk’ builds and closer ‘När ska jag få bli kär då’ leaves us with a light bluesy taste in the goodbye.
A translation of even the song titles might have been nice for a reviewer especially as the promo sheet does come in English, but what started out as a little baffling at first actually ends up with some really cool moments.
