You know that feeling when you drink a lot and you want to throw up but you can’t? I had exactly the same feeling when I saw their video for the song “Lonely Buoy” due to its amalgamated nature. It felt like someone put in the same pot The Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg, black and white movies from the 60s and mixed them with a band of blasé youngsters.

I have a problem with The Last Shadow Puppets, too. It’s a band created by the singer from The Rascals and the one from Arctic Monkeys. They have a true Beatles-ish sound and someone who’s not “trained in the art of listening” and listened only a few times The Beatles, might think they’re listening to some songs created by the legendary band.

I know these bands are loved by the masses of teens who are influenced by anything with good marketing support. To be honest, any band needs some marketing, but that should be only 5% of their success, the rest of 95% being hard work and talent.

The good thing about indie bands that sound the same and copy successful bands is that they make other artists, who are sick of the same sounds, create something unique. If we take a look back in time, we will notice that grunge appeared as a move against glam rock. One of the best grunge bands was Nirvana. Its members didn’t need fancy hairdos and expensive clothing to become one of the most influential bands in the rock music scene. They had their huge share in creating grunge, along with bands like Alice in Chains, Daisy Chainsaw or Pearl Jam.

Another good example of a great band is Placebo, although their latest album makes me wonder if Bono wrote the lyrics and coached Molko to “see the light”. They have an unique sound and you can easily recognize any of their songs on the radio thanks to Brian Molko’s voice. I can say the same about Nirvana’s music.

If you want to know how real indie pop feels like, listen to The Smiths and Morrissey. If you have a look through their lyrics, you will notice that the songs can be transformed easily into poems. You can sing them and you can recite them. When your band will be like Nirvana, Placebo or The Smiths, you can consider yourself an artist. Until then, work as hard as you can and forget about the looks. Music matters.

Let me tell you how I found out about Detektivbyrån and their sweet, precious music. It started with a boring evening and me managing to stumble across some site called thesixtyone.com. It has all the bells and whistles of a music social network – think of last.fm – plus something that makes the experience more interesting: quests. You get quests that involve you listening to some songs after different patterns, e.g. to listen to seven songs released under the Creative Commons license. So, I was playing around that site and accidentally found Detektivbyrån, a Swedish band formed from Anders “Flanders” Molin and Martin “MacGyver” Molin. The song that turned my face into a big, wide smile and made me search for more info and more music of this band like a crazed junkie, is E18. I listened to it on repeat for one hour and it made me think about Yann Tiersen and the movie called “Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain“. After some little research, I’ve discovered that this movie had a real influence in their work from from Wikipedia, where you can find out more about the prizes they won, on which soundtracks they were featured and which commercials used their music.

Snipping scissors, toy pianos, mechanical clocks, xylophones and accordions manage to get you into a world where you’re free to dream, where worries and problems are absent. You just smile and imagine that all your dreams will come true, that there’s a beautiful future waiting for you. This kind of music is exactly what you need when you’re feeling down, it convinces you to make a few more steps on the path called “life”. Through Detektivbyrån’s music you travel to a country of innocence, in a marzipan town where everything is fragile, sweet and where you have a house on the seashore (“Hus Vid Havet”). From this house you can see the waves crashing into the shore with the rhythm offered by a mechanical clock, rhythm defined by a Demiurge obsessed with music and perfect beauty.

Detektivbyrån (The Detective Agency) have released two full-length albums till now – Wermland and E18 Album -, both released in 2008. If I compare their music with Yann Tiersen’s music, I could say that theirs doesn’t have as many layers as the latter’s music. Detektivbyrån’s music tends towards simplicity, minimalism and the general feeling it sends out to me is “innocence”, “remember how life was when you were a child”.

Today I had my first encounter with Lampshade, a Scandinavian post-rock/shoegaze band. They’ve recently released a new EP, called “Stop Pause Play“, after their two full length albums “Because Trees Can Fly” and “Let’s Away“.

They remind me of a Danish band, called Under Byen (“Under the City”), which I was listening to quite obsessively last winter. From my point of view, post-rock is a genre typical to the cold season and, let’s say, to autumn too. I had the tendency to go through shady streets while it was raining or snowing with Under Byen in my headphones as a “depression fix”.

If you’re going to look for them on Wikipedia – as I do from time to time -, stop right now! You won’t find anything about Lampshade over there. As I noticed on their Myspace page, they are now based in Malmo, Sweden and the band consists of Rebekka Maria Andersson, Adam Jacobsson, Johannes Dybkjær Andersson and Erik Nylén, after they’ve changed the band line-up for a few times.

I got all their albums today and started listening to their debut album, “Because Trees Can Fly” (released in 2004),  from which you can listen the eponymous song in the embedded video. The songs have a tendency to start in a melancholic mood, while the end is more aggressive. You know that feeling a few caffeine shots after a long sleep gives you, the one that shakes you pretty hard? Ok, that’s the same feeling you’ll get when you’ll reach the end of those songs.

Sometimes, the singer’s voice sounds a little bit like Bjork, while sometimes her voice made me think about Cocorosie and about some moments from my childhood. The reason I am thinking about my childhood is probably because her voice gets pretty child-like sometimes, similar to the voice of one of my close friends from that time, a very soothing sound I might say.

I was and still am fascinated by “The hug“, their last song from “Because Trees Can Fly”. It doesn’t have complex lyrics, but the music just makes you want *THAT* hug from the one you love. You know, those moments when you feel safe, everything is warm around you, etc., etc. and you don’t want to let go of that feeling.

The best song from the latest EP is “Architecture Wounds“, which brings a more mature sound to the band. The male voice is brought up front and has a greater role than it used to have in the previous releases. “Stop Pause Play” seems to be a balance between the two previous albums, combining the mellow sounds from “Because Trees Can Fly” with the rapid rhythm from “Let’s Away”. “Den Støjende Tid” starts with a bass guitar and Rebekka Maria Andersson’s voice in a combination that gave me shivers down my spine and made me curl with auditive pleasure.

As an ending note for my first encounter with this band, I can say that I instantly fell in love with their music and I’ll keep a close eye on them. I am sorry that I skipped a lot of their songs in this article, which might prove even better than those that I presented, but I want you to find out more about them by yourself. The “discovery” will prove very satisfying, trust me.

About “First Encounter”: a category containing articles that are written when I listen to a band for the first time. They are written after listening to a band for a couple of days.

Welcome to Alternatree, a fresh blog with a dark twist. We’re doing our best to get the juice out of the fruits that trees – the artists, the writers – bear and present you another side of the arts.

Everything started when I got sick of all the musical madness that’s all around us. There are too many “trees” with strong roots in the music industry that should’ve been long gone. Why do I say that? Because they don’t produce anything new, just the same tasteless fruits that get sold to hungry crowds with the supermarket mentality. The best example is the American music industry, which has only a few precious artists left.

Europe gave birth to a larger number of valuable artists lately than any other continent. I might be biased, as I am from Europe, but all the great music I made contact with in the last couple of years was created in Europe. The most important “artist” incubators are Germany (for industrial, goth, EBM, darkwave, etc. bands), UK (for indie bands) and the Scandinavian countries for electronic music, shoegaze, pagan folk, viking metal. Other countries might have their share of creative juices to “the alternative”, but I’ll concentrate mostly on Europe.

My goal is to show you there’s an alternative to what you got used to. I’m going to do my best by presenting the bands, artists, books, etc. that are creating great stuff and could be influencial in the following years.

Why I am talking about “we”? Because I’m not into this thing alone. Because I’m sure more persons share my point of view when it comes to the already discussed subjects. I will have a few guest writers on the blog soon who will make the things more interesting.