Artist: Dungen
Title: Self-Titled (plus bonus tracks)
Label: Subliminal Sounds
Format: CD
Price: $17.75

In September of 2004 Pitchfork beat us at our own game of informing you about the best new Swedish music. Their 9.3 review of Dungen’s “Ta Det Lugnt” album sent readers scrambling to find a stocked retail outlet and distributors scrambling to fill demand.

“Ta Det Lugnt is an exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity that evokes Keith Moon's drum fills on The Who Sell Out, the wraiths of unsung bedroom psyche celebrants, and the acoustic sustain and harmonizing of The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday, Ta Det Lugnt feels less like a new release than some ancient tome, a fully formed masterpiece dropped unexpectedly on corduroy laps from some blue-brown sky.” Hey, and these dudes even sing in Swedish!

Now that 2004’s year-end best-of lists are safely stored in the archives we can all take a collective breath and find out, who is this Dungen and is “Ta Det Lugnt” its/his/their only album?

Dungen, the band, revolves around multi instrumentalist (guitars and vocals, of course, plus violin and flute) centerpiece Gustav Ejstes. Back in 2001 they released a debut LP limited to 500 copies, which eventually sold out. With the success of “Ta Det Lugnt” Subliminal Sounds has issued the album for the first time on CD, with extra tracks from the period 1999-2001. What remains consistent is the SOUND of the instruments. The drums and what surround could have been lifted from Os Mutantes’ celebrated first three albums lending an other-otherworldly time & place to songs recorded 30+ years hence. Whereas the Pitchfork blurb above refers to “bedroom psyche,” the instrumentation on the self-titled Dungen debut sometimes crosses into extended “bedroom prog” passages, taking it into Canterbury Sound territory occupied by Caravan. And then, the psychout returns.

The debut doesn’t pack the immediate wallop of “Ta Det Lugnt”, but fans and curiosity seekers shouldn’t bypass this re-issue without serious investigation.