Dungen are a quartet as bubbly as the bikini team and screwy as the chef from their homeland of Sweden. The psychedelic/progressive assemblage’s fourth album, Tio Bitar (translation = ‘Ten Pieces’), is a smelly net full of offbeat land flappers recently scooped from the bottom of some strange sea. Singer/composer Gustav Ejstes sings every lyric in Swedish, which is now unofficially the 117th most popular language on earth (behind French).
“Gör Det Nu,” a wave of frizzy guitars over a tubular Hawaii Five-O drum swell, is a stellar standout amongst the scatterbrained sounds of these strange Scandinavians. The acoustic critter “Caroline Visar Vägen” sprouts wings and buzzes back to easy listening bongos and strings, that might make Carol Kane or James Taylor give a thumbs-up & smile.
“Du Ska Inte Tro Att Det Ordnar Sig” activates the blood flow in the arteries that were clogged with frustration while trying to find some actual answers within these enigmatic anthems. No dice. The song strangely peters out into a random minute of delicate keys and soft wind chimes, heightening the weird level to “totally bananas.” Even as the hunky chunk classic rock riffs rip apart the opening of “Mon Amour,” I still think Sigur Ros sucked down a dozen pounds of excellent opium, grew multi-color Mohawks, and started up an Asian punk band. These Black Sabbath students unleash an unfair assault of heavy, mind-altering metal, to cleanse the palate on the second side on their peculiar package of imported sound.
There is no firm agenda or defined goals as far as I can hear. It’s Ozzy one minute and Ginsberg the next, tight pants to Birkenstocks within Swedish seconds. It’s as if Queen caught a nasty itch of The Moody Blues for an uneventful case of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, leaving me ever so perturbed after being abducted for a lousy 40-minutes by an outfit of mindless merrymakers.
“Gör Det Nu”
