Solblomma (Sweden) – Mats (single/track from forthcoming album)

In advance of her forthcoming album ‘Alla var där’ (‘Everyone was there’), which will be released on 15^th August, the perennially quirky but don’t we just love her for it Solblomma releases what will probably be the last single from it.

This one is called ‘Mats’. All the songs are named after characters and we’ve already featured ‘Eugen’ and ‘Torkel’. Some of them are real like Brigitte Bardot, or dreamed up by others, such as Don Quijote.

But most of them are the product of her unbelievably fertile imagination, which makes the French sex bomb and the windmill tilter look as dry and drab as one of those forlorn pasty figures in an L S Lowry painting,

‘Mats’ gets himself involved in one of Solblomma’s irresistible but unfathomable stories where ‘fathoms’ do actually play at part as “we” (I‘m guessing this is Mats and Solblomma) take a boat to an island, sunbathe nude and then skinny dip to the bottom to meet “a slippery friend” which had me thinking immediately of Gabriel’s ‘Slipperman’ in ‘The Lamb lies down on Broadway’.

In fact that surreal connection with a band from the mid-1970s continues by way of a reference to that friend “lurking amongst the clouds”, which evoked Genesis’ ‘Watcher of the Skies’ and then “carried forward like the Lord’s lamb in the good calm” (‘Supper’s Ready’).

It might seem strange to mention Genesis and Solblomma in the same breath but both were/are grounded in vivid imaginations at the cutting edge of their respective eras.

Musically, ‘Mats’ is as zany as ever although dancier than I’ve heard from her for a long time. It’s sort of half sixties pop and half soft rock with a bass line that plays its own tune and then suddenly from out of nowhere a melody arrives that could be a lost one from New Order.

One of the big attractions to me with Solblomma is that you genuinely have no idea what she is going to do next. Indeed the ‘quirky’ allusion really does her no favours; in reality she’s simply operating on a different platform to everyone else.

The last album, which took us on a tour of the underworld (‘The Lamb…’ again, she really should we working with Gabriel) surprised me with its maturity and confidence. As for this one, who knows?

All we do know for sure is that there are 10 compositions that all take place on Track 7 of an unknown station and which are each about the various characters. They are waiting on the platform. But there are no trains coming. (And this isn’t Britain and there is no rail strike).

No one is there – but Everyone was there.

Figure that out if you can. Don’t have nightmares.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4wz6ow1HdFDdF7ImDcUhed?si=99cdd7a89675407b

Find her on:

Website: https://solblomma.com/