The Concretes "Grey Days"

So the Concretes sorta imploded this year, huh. On their first two records, they’d taken the road that many Swedish bands took to notice in America, which is as follows: find one or two pretty distinct American pop traditions, combine them, and then write a bunch of songs that adhere to a very basic theme that doesn’t go beyond a narrow conception of either of the two genres. The Concretes, pretty much by their second album, settled on Motown (maybe girl groups, but yeah, Motown definitely) and the woozy narcosis of either Nico or, well, yeah let’s go with Nico. They did it well enough to get a ton of positive press and a Target commercial (one that I guessed Ikea initially, ’cause of the Scandi connection), and a little bit of excitement about In Colour. Well, they basically did the opposite of what people thought they were going to, or perhaps should do, which is try to make an artistic statement and put out a record that touched on a huge variety of not too closely-related styles. And it’s not a horrible album, but it’s far from a great one. It’s got “On the Radio,” which always reminds me of really poppy Madness for whatever reason, “Fiction,” which sounds like dorked-out, lite jazz Kraut (read: sorta awesome), and a few other songs that sounded like dorked-out twee country pop. And then they played a bizarrely confrontational show in Chicago that I saw (among other things), and then sorta-creepy Victoria Bergsman dropped out of the band. I assume they’re going to go on sans their main vocalist, and if that means more stuff that sounds like Maria Erikkson’s “Grey Days,” (mp3) then that’s pretty cool with me. It’s easily the highlight of the record; straight out of the playbook of mid-Seventies Fleetwood Mac, and sounding like a perfect collaboration between Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. It’s a lilting, layered, quietly gorgeous realization that sometimes it’s best to be practical, despite desperately wanting the ideal to happen. It’s about how bittersweet it feels to not have anyone around to see you being happy, so it’s not really happy at all, is it?