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Vice Blog

LONDON - JOIN THE BOAT CLUB

Sweden must be the most charming place on Earth because it has more brilliant, dreamy pop music than anywhere else. You may have heard of acts like the Tough Alliance and Air France, but scratch under the surface and there are even more Saint Etienne worshipers, Pet Shop Boys acolytes, and Orange Juice disciples. It's a religion out there.

Boat Club are my current favorite of this crop. They make electronic pop with the swooniest twangy guitar sounds this side of the Everly Brothers. We said "Hi!" to one half of the Club, Magnus, for a brief chat, after which you'll find a couple of tracks to exfoliate your brain.

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Vice: How did Boat Club come together?
Magnus: Me and Andreas started playing in 1999 in a pretentious noise-making band. But as time went on we got more and more interested in combining the noise-making with conventional pop structures, and so we found ourselves making shoegazey pop music. At this time we were a full band called Citylights. We recorded a lot of stuff in my apartment, and for practical purposes we used electronic drums, just for our demos (or rather memory notes). Later on we found that we had so many ideas ourselves that it was basically impractical to have a full band, so we formed Boat Club. After that the conversion to more and more electronics felt pretty natural.

What records inspire the music you make with Boat Club?
A few big inspirational records would be:

New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies

Pet Shop Boys - Behaviour

The Wake - Here Comes Everybody

Most of the Bouquet stuff.

Most of the Cocteau Twins stuff.

And for guitar inspiration, I have picked up a lot from a band called Fint Tillsammans.

Andreas simply states: Slowdive - Pymalion, the world's best pop/ambient album.

Seems to be a whole lot going on in Gothenburg over the last couple of years, with acts like the Tough Alliance, Air France and Studio getting a lot of press. Did you know them before?
There have been a lot of good bands from Gothenburg lately, it's all pretty exciting. We didn't know them before, but it's a pretty small city so we bump into each other every now and then.

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So apart from those three relative behemoths, who else from your town would you recommend we should listen to?
There are a lot of nice groups like Ikons, My Darling You, Honeydrips, the fantastic performance group Angry Law, Fint Tillsammans, Bandjo, Sail a Whale, Korallreven, The Crepes, Outmen, and Bridal shop.

What's the strangest show you've ever played?
The strangest show is yet to come, I'm sure. This Wednesday we will do a show in Malmö, but Andreas is at a Greek wedding so either we'll do a show with Andreas on video-link, or I will bring Josef Storm and Luxury-Rasmus and improvise something. I'm sure it's going to be strange.

Any plans to head anywhere else?
We'd love to play the UK, we just haven't been invited.

You are cordially invited, Magnus.

Boat Club - "All the Time"

Boat Club - "Spanish Castles" (Ultracity remix)

JOEL WRIGHT