Review Summary: A pretty solid album that fails to live up to it's predecessor.
In 2011 Veronica Maggio released one of the best Swedish pop albums in many years, Satan i Gatan. Critics did not only praise it, it was also Maggio's biggest commercial success in her career. With songs like Jag Kommer, Välkommen in and Snälla bli min, she had been cemented as one of the biggest names in Swedish pop. Needles to say expectations were high when it was announced that she was releasing a new album, Handen i fickan fast jag bryr mig. It was released and Veronica was back!
Well, okay, not really. Now, it is a good album. It has some really nice tunes and cool ideas. The first single, Sergels torg, was a good little pop song with a catchy beat and featured miss Maggio's very original voice.
Låtsas som det regnar was the strongest song on the album. A love song about a partner that is pretty apathetic to the relationship's problems, which is not a new topic, but her voice and the music just makes you think that this is really a big deal and actually you feel sorry for her. And while violins may seem like a cliché at this point, it was actually handled very well. It didn’t seem over the top sad, it was just genuinely nice and felt nice. Her voice is just wonderful, smooth and nice that makes you chill down to the very core.
Another song that’s worth mentioning is Jag lovar, an upbeat pop song that becomes an instant favourite. While lyrically it’s not that new, (party party party) musically it sounds very original and a Maggio kind of song. It has a catchy chorus and the clapping in the beginning is really nice.
But these are some of the few gems.
A song that surprisingly was a disappointment was Hela huset, a duet with Håkan Hellström, one of the biggest male pop stars in Sweden. The song felt very out of place and seemed to fit better on Hellström record. And if you’re not a fan of Håkan Hellströms very special sound, chances are you’re not going to like this song. The lyrics are repetitive and the song is just flat out forgettable.
And that’s another major problem: repetitive lyrics. Maggio used to dominate this musical art form (?) but here it just doesn’t work. Well on some tracks it does, like Jag lovar but for most of the record it actually gets annoying at some points. This can be very hard to pull off and here she fails at it.
Also many of the songs aren’t that memorable. Some of them are very easy to forget which is also disappointing. Okay, there are few albums that are absolutely perfect. But it’s not like with Death Magnetic by Metallica where most of the songs where good but forgettable. Here some of them are forgettable and not very good.
Since her last album was such a success, the expectations were through the roof. It was gonna be like Satan i Gatan II, ad well, it wasn’t. Now don’t get me wrong, this is a good album, one of the best of this year and with what they got, it works really well. But is that what you want from a woman that is clearly very good at what she does? No, you want the best, as good as it can be. This is probably a record that will get better with time, but right now it’s just good and we didn’t want good. All you can think is: Come on Veronica, you can do better than that.
This is an album that you can’t say that the negative stuff takes over the positive, not at all. But we wanted more, and again, it was good.
