Review Summary: Dungen's "Allas Sak" is their most human, most musical album yet.
Dungen's Gustav Ejstes knows nothing if not what a band should sound like. And he's never been one to let what a band does sound like get in the way of what a band should sound like. For many years, he played all of the instruments himself. One of the great modern psych-rock self-producers, Ejstes found a way to shoehorn his varied compositional interest into a band format - into recordings that would eventually kick ass live. While a certain degree of 60's cut-and-paste aesthetic removes the records from the dull constraints of time and space, what emerges nonetheless is a technicolor document of a band making remarkably polymath music.
According to an interview with Tape Op in 2011, it was not until Hogdalstoppen off of their 2010 release, “Skit I Alt” that what had become a fully assembled band actually did it all live together in a room. Ejstes describes the kinky excitement of making music “with a knife to the throat.” And the results were palpable - as if their uncanny portrait of the real finally discovered its binding agent.
2015's “Allas Sak”, Dungen's latest record and first in five years, is above all a document of a real band sounding great. By all accounts, it was done live and at the hands of “analog recording genius,” Petter Winnberg, who encouraged the band to write and arrange ahead of time instead of as they went. The same signature cast of crack players and thundering mix is present: drums prominent center-left; prog-god Reine Fiske's fuzz guitars and Ejstes' pianos and flutes holding down the wings and entangling in a cautious but dazzling vehicle for harmony and songwriting.
The newfound presence found here makes “Allas Sak” a highly musical listen. Even on blaring instrumental jams like Franks Kaktus – the mad, taper-core, artichoke heart of the record - or En Dag Pa Sjon (“A Day on the Lake”), its extended counterpart - the album takes a razor sharp approach to arrangement and orchestration. Matthias Gustavsson's bass routinely ducks out to allow room for the piano or the wood flute. But when it's in – like on Akt Dit where it sounds like ripping band-aids off a timpani – it's in. Johan Holmegaard's effortlessly rich drums, which have long been one of the more welcome focal points of Dungen's sound, are, nevertheless, cleverly missing from tracks where Ejstes' stacked vocal harmonies (Sista Festen) redirect our attention to the melody. Everything is in its right place; like zeppelin traffic carefully routed through the night.
But that doesn’t mean the record lacks imagination or the magic of a recorded experience. More left-field tracks which expose Ejstes' Swedish folk pedigree, like Sista Festen, manage to capture the non-cynical exuberance of mystical music without ever toppling into track-skip territory.
While they’d escape non-Swedish speakers, the lyrics create a narrative of fleeting inspiration in the grip of routine isolation. Track two “Sista Festen” - translated as “Last Party” - feeds into “Sista Gesten “Last Guest” as though a momentary breach of solitude were shrinking, track-by-track, towards life as usual in the Swedish countryside. There, simple internal battles mark the passing of time. On Sista Gesten: “When I wonder how we have got what we want, then he will answer that he stopped caring about what the others think”. In his closing words to Brandon Stosuy in his 2011 interview, Ejstes remarks of Sweden: “There is a lot of space and few people.” This reality feels more organically reflected in Allas Sak than ever before.
Despite the overwhelming vividness of Allas Sak, the pallet is not without its moments of dullness, which may well stand out to the more cynical amongst us. The piano and Rhodes sounds on tracks like Flickor Och Pojkar (“Boys and Girls”) seem to me less Kid-A Greenwood and more than a bit George Winston adult contemporary. That said, what would a Dungen record be without a bit of discomfort? Without the moments of failure that are the yang of their unrestrained commitment to experimentation, there would be no Dungen. Or great, worthwhile records for that matter.
