CMU Playlists

Playlist: Club 8

By | Published on Tuesday 21 May 2013

Club 8

Swedish duo Club 8 release their eighth studio album, ‘Above The City’, the follow-up to 2010′s ‘The People’s Record’, this week via Labrador Records. The new long player sees them experimenting within the confines of pop, working their way through an array of sounds, all nicely held together by the vocals of Karolina Komstedt.

Produced by the other half of the band, Johan Angergård, the pair also went fairly retro, in music technology terms, when making the record, using a thirteen year old copy of Cubase VST software (I would have gone one step further and used Notator on an old Atari, personally), explaining: “With less advanced technology at hand you need to create your sounds in a more ‘hands on’, less artificial kind of way”.

Ahead of the album release, we asked Angergård to put together a playlist for us. In doing so, he took us through his formative musical influences (aged three to fifteen), some of which touch on sounds found in the new album.

Explaining the thinking behind his choices, he said: “For a long time I thought my taste in music changed from time to time. That wasn’t true. Looking back I can see that all the music I’ve ever loved is music I still hold dear. There have been periods when I’ve listened more intensely to some stuff and then stopped listening to it for a while. That ‘while’ could last ten years, but things always come back. Here’s what my music fixations looked like when I grew up”.

JOHAN ANGERGÅRD’S TEN
Subscribe to this playlist on Spotify, and then read on to find out more about Johan’s choices.

01 Three years old: Elvis Presley – Moody Blue
My father always played Elvis records at home. As I had to listen to it so much I believe I started to like it. I’m quite sure I liked ‘Moody Blue’, at least.

02 Seven years old: Frida – I Know There’s Something Going On
The first album I ever bought. I wasn’t too happy about it though because I only liked the title track. Even though I haven’t listened that much to it since, it must have effected me deeply. I hadn’t heard ‘I Know There’s Something Going On’ for ages when I heard it by accident in a shop a few months ago. I thought it was amazing. I loved it more now than back then. I also noticed that it sounded a bit like ‘Less Than Love’, which we had recorded a couple of months earlier. It must have got stuck in my subconscious.

03 Nine years old: The Exploited – (Fuck The) USA
My time as a punk rocker is probably the shortest sub-cultural phase I’ve ever gone through. I believe it lasted for roughly six months. I listened to Sex Pistols, Ebba Grön and, my favourite of the lot, The Exploited. I had pictures of all the members on my walls. This was my favourite track by the band and I still like it. It’s really hard, yet not un-melodic at all.

04 Nine and a half years old: Depeche Mode – I Sometimes I Wish I Was Dead
This is from ‘Speak And Spell’, one of the best produced albums ever. I loved the synthesizer sounds here. No chords. Everything sounds super exact. All the songs on the album have timeless pop qualities. I also loved Yazoo around this time. It was the saddest band split up ever when they broke up. Vince had such a cool fringe.

05 Ten years old: Kraftwerk – Computer World
I believe I wore a Kraftwerk t-shirt on the school photo in fourth grade. The sounds on ‘Computer World’, and the title track in particular, was pure magic to me. It was other worldly.

06 Twelve years old: Pet Shop Boys – Painero (Italian Remix)
I was musically disoriented for a while after my synth-pop period. I don’t remember being a huge fan of anything when I was eleven. Pet Shop Boys were a band I had listened to before and which I continued to like. I bought ‘Disco’ when it was released. The versions of ‘Painero’ and ‘In The Night’ from that album are still two of my absolute favourite PSB songs.

07 Twelve and a half years old: The Smiths – Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others
My older brother Niklas, who sings in Acid House Kings by the way, was introduced to The Smiths and The Jesus And Mary Chain by a friend called Lasse Wierup (later in Mondial on Labrador). Niklas played The Smiths’ ‘The Queen Is Dead’ album over and over at home. It took me a long long time before I started enjoying it. The first months I just found it very plain, dull and grey. The first song that caught my attention, in a good way, was ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. Then it wasn’t long before I loved this band more than anything.

08 Thirteen years old: The Jesus And Mary Chain – Taste The Floor
The Smiths were my favourite band at the time, but The Jesus And Mary Chain were the coolest. Everything about them was just dead cool. The videos, photos, haircuts, album artwork and most of all of course, the guitar sounds. ‘Taste The Floor’ has the best guitar sound of them all. It’s still the best distorted guitar sound I’ve ever heard. Possibly the best guitar sound of all ever. I tried a Reid hairstyle one day in school. Didn’t work out that well. I did dress in black though.

09 Thirteen and a half years old: Nitzer Ebb – Murderous
My love for arpeggiated analogue sounding monophonic synthesizers had a revival in seventh grade, but this time I fell for harder stuff like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, The Klinik, Skinny Puppy and so on. It matched my love for The Jesus And Mary Chain, Joy Division and The Cure. I could still wear black.

10 Fifteen years old: The Field Mice – Emma’s House
This was the first song I heard from Sarah Records. I loved the simplicity and the honesty. I very soon started reading their flyers/inserts thoroughly and bought everything on the label. I got deep into the world of small indie bands and labels and stayed there for a long time. There was a huge radio show called ‘Tracks’ in Sweden which was a chart that was compiled through listeners voting on songs. I heard this song on that show and I loved it right away.



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