It could be a bleak Ken Loach film script, with a couple of British lads, let’s say Badly Drawn Boy and The Streets, providing the score, of which this is the intro or the outro, or both, depending on how you interpret it.
GOLA is a new duo from Stockholm and consists of two old friends, Samuel Berg and Charlie Johansson, who reconnected after years apart to write about what they’ve lived through in that period.
Their debut single ‘Painting by Numbers’ is a quiet reckoning with addiction, which presumably both have experienced, written not to make a point, but to help process the experience and come to terms with it.
The song is about being young and believing you’re immortal (yes, I vaguely remember that) and escaping by way of cocaine, creating a safe space to hide from the feeling of being lost.
And the title, I assume, represents the pointlessness of this existence when you get into that state of mind. It would have made a good title for a Carter USM song; the undisputed kings of the maudlin song.
It’s a slow burner, illuminated by the nonsense talk of the addict…
”This is my room/don’t mind the mess/I’ll fix it later”
“Sit next to me/we can be free/I can’t remember/what was your name again?
“Let’s go downtown/let’s get some food/but please can you pay/I’ll pay back later.”
Towards the end a string arrangement is introduced, courtesy of Erik Arvinder and which turns it into something more than slightly Beatles-like.
In all the years I’ve been doing this I can’t recall another song of this ‘washing your dirty linen in public’ nature coming out of the Nordics. It will certainly hit a nerve with British audiences and I hope GOLA can reach out to them.
Find them on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/golabandoolaband/
