Dungen
Electric Ballroom, London
Young Swedes get cosmic. Flutes are involved
From funky flatpack furniture to robust family runabouts, when the Swedes put their finger on a niche idea, they precision-tool it to perfection. The Hives, for example, didn’t so much reanimate the corpse of garage rock as stick 20,000 volts up its arse and instruct it to roger us remorselessly.
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Now it seems the land of the Vikings has turned its attention to psychedelia. The Soundtrack Of Our Lives already have the distinction of being the first group since The Beatles to make a dent in Liam Gallagher’s consciousness. But after seeing Dungen, even that band’s mighty Ebbot Lundberg must be quaking in his kaftan.
“You are very many,” announces frontman Gustav Eistes, looking like Embrace’s Danny McNamara after two years on a kibbutz. Clad in jeans so tight you can see which way he dresses (to the right, on this occasion) he swishes his impressive hair in the direction of equally fuzzy bassist Andreas Stellan and they lurch into the playful Eno-funk of “Gjort Bort Sig’. The reaction of the crowd is one of mass befuddlement (“They’re singing in Swedish”; “How the fuck do we mosh to this?”; “Um, hasn’t this guitar solo been going on for a decade?”) giving way to nodding appreciation as they lock into the twin guitar slashes of “Panda’.
Guitarist Reine Fiske brings to mind The Verve’s Nick McCabe as he constantly battles to keep the feedback at bay, while later Ejstes pauses to whip out his secret weapon. It’s a flute! And it’s approximately the most sensual thing this audience has ever seen, as this strutting rock god applies delicate, breathy flourishes to the calm before the acid-drenched storm of new song ‘Damer & Samer’.
Michael Eavis: book Dungen for Glastonbury. They’ll remind you of Tyrannosaurus Rex (you couldn’t tell what they were singing, either) and they’re suitably mind-expanding to inspire a generation lost to the clenched Killers, conservative Coldplay and deluded Razorlight to drop a tab, stop the war and chuck their hoodies in the tie-dye. As great Swedish inventions go, Dungen are right up there with matches, the zip and ball bearings. Martin Horsfield
First published in NME, 28 May 2005
Footnote: That punter vox-popped at the bootom of the review is my mate Mike becasue, well, who can be bothered to do vox pops? Pleased also that this is a rare example of me getting a whole page in NME, with my headline on it to boot. Sadly, after this triumph, it was off to pastures new.
