[0]Just like the name of Det Gamla Landet (“The Old Country” in Swedish) indicates, this is an ensemble that delivers nostalgic qualities in spades. Band member Mats Larsson says that the name “brings back memories from an old, dark but yet romantic place that we come from or where we have lived in a past life.” Given all that, it makes sense that the two official releases of the band - a 7” and a full-length CD on the Swedish Aa [1] label - deliver mostly instrumental back porch tales fusing traditional folk with something slightly more modern, and the results are nothing short of spellbinding.
Det Gamla Landet is basically a bunch of old friends that in the year 2000 started to make music while hanging out and drinking. One day one of the guys found a banjo and from that point there was simply no turning back. There’s something distinctly Swedish about the sounds these guys create. I would even go as far as to say that these acoustic, folk-inspired sounds simply couldn’t have been recorded anywhere but in Sweden. There’s something about the band’s whiskey-soaked sadness and disillusion that reflects the dark rainy winters of the south, but there’s also enough Midsummer happiness hidden under the surface to illustrate the time of the year when it’s pretty much light night and day.
Det Gamla Landet lives in the multi-cultural town of Malmö in southern Sweden. Larsson reveals that they “like it here, even though it sometimes is a little depressive. We record and make all the music in an apartment above a shopping center/mall in central Malmö. It’s nice to look down at the busy people running around in the streets.” That rush certainly doesn’t get into the recordings as this is music that takes its time to get where it’s going and is more of a document of the past than one trapped inside the unspoken rules of the modern society. When listening to Det Gamla Landet one just can’t help but find oneself traveling in a time machine to a time where the harsh realities of life might have been a bit more physical but perhaps still somewhat easier to deal with. Larsson tells me that when they made their first songs they were thinking of the civil war, and that feeling is still there but not in the same sense. Now it’s more mixed with old Swedish forests, rainy days in the ‘70s or whatever feeling comes to mind at the moment.
[1] The self-titled debut album is a strangely alluring record that meanders along the deserted streets of Malmö with a great sense of melancholia, desperately trying to find the new soul of the changing city. But at the same time as this is urban music it also includes so much beauty and space that I certainly can see the connection to the rural landscape as well. I guess you could call it escape from the urban reality if you want, but when asking Larsson about these quite contradictory poles he claims that it’s simply “a combination of the way we live our lives in the city with the fantasy we have about the old romantic, open land we find the feeling all the members of Det Gamla Landet possess.”
So even though it’s a document of abandoned city streets it also includes vaguely psychedelic music aimed to present the sounds of the mystical Swedish landscapes. There’s a sort of serene, majestic beauty and sense of isolation in the timelessly despairing banjo and guitar-driven ballads that often are draped in curtains of melodica. Simple melodies are embellished with a suggestive kind of brilliance, implying it’s almost easy, making this a difficult record to explain and pigeonhole, but I do know that this is music for 2:45 AM when the last drunks have grumbled home from the bars just so they can awaken to work and hangovers.
There are of course plenty of ways to listen to all this but if you ask me the ultimate environment for listening to Det Gamla Landet is with a bottle of whiskey, looking at old photos of relatives who were buried at sea. It isn't until the morning sun finds its way into your living room and calls out for another day that Det Gamla Landet lets go. The long and lonely night is temporarily interrupted, but everyone knows that the sun will shortly evaporate from the horizon and another night will be here.
(More information about the group can be found at the Det Gamla Landet website [2].)
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