| Dungen & Woods Review |
| Written by Christopher Sullivan | |||
  It may be hard to think on first listen Dungen would be such a critical hit in the US, considering all of the bands lyrics are in Swedish, but there is something about the band that transcends language barriers. Dungen’s latest album, 4, which was released on Kemado Records is a kind of compilation of the bands last albums, blending the pop, jazz, and straight up rock all together, switching between the two more unexpectedly and somehow less noticeably than before. When asked what his favorite records are, Ejstez politely balks at the question, saying “so many, so, so many.” He compares growing up in a rural village in Sweden very dissimilar to today’s iPod generation of music goers. “We only had you know, maybe 20 albums in the house that we would listen to over and over again. My parents had the choir from church come to the house, so we listened to them a lot.” One record that he does mention though is Jimi Hendrixs’s Experience, whose sound even after all these years the band wears prominently on their sleeve. Some influences though that may not be so noticeable are the hip hop groups Ejstez grew up on in his youth. “My mom used to come in my room and see my Ice Cube poster with him holding a gun and be like ‘why do you like this?’ There was something about gangster rap or that militant Islam thing that I identified with when I was 12, which I guess is weird since I was from a village in Sweden. It was my punk phase.” Now Ejstev is in a band whose name means a “grove of trees” in Swedish. It seems appropriate for the bands performance the next night, touring with a band named Woods and playing in Brooklyn’s Bell House, which has a striking resemblance to a barn. There is an intimate feeling to Bell House, two vintage chandeliers hang above the crowd and a giant painting of a Buffalo looks down from above the stage. It’s as if a bunch of Brooklyn indie music goers somehow ended up lost in the woods and have gone back in time three decades. Speaking of woods, Woods, returning home for one night on one of their first major tours, has just recently begun picking up more wide critical praise, boosting them onto bills with Dungen, and earlier in the summer the recently reunited Vaselines. Their first song starts in sonic fuzz, a kind of long ranging instrumental session not too dissimilar from the headliner, but smothered in the kind of lo-fi noise that has taken over the borough and much of the country in the past year and a half. But unlike much of their Bushwick contemporaries, who choose to play pop tinged punk songs, Woods instead fall into gentle falsetto folk music, reminiscent of drinking beer on a sunny day in a field, soothing after the noise they sometimes go into. The Brooklyn quartet, used to playing smaller DIY basement shows, went through much of their recent album “Songs of Shame”, going from subtle hooks, to Jeremy Earl’s more somber songs...of shame. The set ends sounding like if Neil Young wandered in and got lost in a Sonic Youth record, but liked what he heard and decided to hang out for a bit. By the time Dungen entered the stage, the packed crowd was ready. The Swedish rock band looks lost in the sixties in tight clothes and long blond hair that looks like it hasn’t been washed in some time. They went through almost all of the most recent album, as well as good chunks of their previous three albums, Tio Bitar, Strasvandringer, and the critically acclaimed Ta Det Lugnt. The band hasn’t been working on new material lately as a group (Ejstev’s computer broke, forcing him to focus on acoustic material.) The band goes off, falling into long instrumental jams not too dissimilar from Hendrix, or the funk and psychedelic bands of 60’s and 70’s Sweden. “It depends on the night, how we are feeling on stage,” he says, discussing the bands tendencies to wander in their songs. “Last night it was so warm on stage and somehow we just kept playing and playing.” While the band certainly can “jam”, don’t call them a jam band. Ejstev spits out the phrase. “We’re not like those so called ‘jam bands’, we always go back to our song.” He describes himself as a “total dictator” in the studio. “It takes patience, I can be an asshole in the studio, but it takes patience and training yourself to work with the people around you. I’m really lucky to have the people around me I do.” The possessiveness over the music comes to an end at a certain point, when it is offered to the listener. And the new owners, hanging out in this old wooden barn seem very pleased in that gift. The band finishes up with some crowd pleasers and the viewers disperse. Dungen and Woods still have a few more weeks in the US, and then it’s back to Sweden.
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