[09.02] Last year I took a trip to Stockholm in search of beautiful people, meatballs, and the Swedish indie rock scene. I found the beautiful people right away and the meatballs within the first week, but I never could find the the music I was seeking. It seemed like most of my friends there liked bubbly pop, heavy metal, or hip hop from America (the Swedish hip hop scene is almost a joke) and besides, we spent most of our nights hanging out at really chic clubs and bars where you needed to be "cool" to get in and where no stage was present and the music played had the sole intention of making you want to shake your ass on the dance floor. It's obvious to me now that I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, at least if I wanted to find indie rock.

Logh is one of those bands that I didn't know about at the time, but was definitely, passively in search of while I was there. While not nearly as hip as their fellow country mates the Hives or International Noise Conspiracy, Logh makes beautiful emotional music, albeit music that is more along the same lines of bands like Low and Mogwai than their more rockin' contemporaries. Their songs are lo-fi and mid tempo and could serve as backgound music if you want them to be, but are also very pretty and textured and well worth listening to. Just don't let the title of the album, Every Time a Bell Rings an Angel Gets His Wings, fool you for this is not cheesy music and they do not sing about how wonderful life is. Rather, singer Mattias Friberg succesfully conveys what the dreariness of Scandinavian winters can do to a soul. His words are poetic though full of melancholy. "We plod our way through the ashes and the dust left of our plans, of all things we've shared," he sings in the opening line of the very first track called "In Cold Blood." Friberg's lyrics become especially powerful when set to the moodiness of the minimalistic arrangements on each song and the album as a whole seems to fit together almost as if it was one long track.

In all honesty, while I enjoyed Every Time a Bell Rings an Angel Gets His Wings a great deal, and in fact am still listening to it, I was never blown away by anything that Logh is doing here. Friberg's voice is pleasant and the songwriting is good and at times brilliant, but I would not call it innovative (not that it has to be). I do, however, find the album to be very fitting for times of introspection and calm. In addition, I hear elements in the music that I like and hear in music from other great indie bands such as Death Cab For Cutie, Pedro the Lion, and Grandaddy as well as singer/songwriter Hayden so I would definitely recommend it to my friends and to anybody in search of something low key. —Matthew