the pathetic caverns - music by artist - The Sounds

On disc-opener "Song with a Mission," vocalist Maja Ivarsson sneers her best Johnny Rotten over bright chunky chords and one-note basslines straight from The Alarm's second album. She switches to Perry Farrell for the chorus and the guitars go compressed and midrangey. The Sounds also offer up the monosyllabic inanity of the earliest rock/rap crossovers and the in-love-with-their-own-artificiality synths of early Depeche Mode. They corralled Killers' producer Jeff Saltzman to help balance their record between brash and slick, some of the tunes are catchy, and if the public's appetite for Swedish bands holds steady, they'll probably be huge. But its also seems more than a little calculated, and it's essentially content-free: Ivarsson by turns is angry, horny, and vaguely dissatisfied, but not in ways that are original or distinctive. What are The Sounds dying to say? Maybe it's, "We put the '80s in a blender." Many of the bands that The Sounds plunder had more to say that might be worth dying for, and they were at least trying to do something new.