With their heads angled back to catch exploding stars and holograms, Middle America teens in the 70’s found an escape in psychedelic light shows. The bright red and blue lasers splayed across ceilings were a welcome break from the drab beige and browns of landlocked suburbia. Many of these stargazers could trace their lineage back to the Scandanavians who left the craggy coasts and dense forests of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway to emigrate to farm the plains of the Midwest. Perhaps an unconscious wistfulness for their great-great-grandparents’ homeland drew them to the light shows and the mythological and fantastical elements of the music that often accompanied them.
Hailing from Sweden, the members of Dungen continue this tradition, filling their music with the mystery and stoic spirit of their Nordic past. On the group’s latest album, Skitt I All, they create stark and enveloping landscapes where sharp guitars slice through the crisp night air and full-bodied drums implode into black holes. Even in moments of gentleness such as "Marken Lag Stilla," the band constructs a spacious vastness where bandleader Gustav Ejstes’ voice floats atop the sizzle of high hats and cymbals. Despite singing in Swedish, his words manage to transcend language, sending a yearning melancholy across sustained guitar tones and stately piano chords.
The calm piano introduction to “Hogdalstoppen” suggests a similar stillness, but churning drums crash through the haze, rattling into the heavens. A guitar twists and bends above a repeating bass ostinato as Johan Holmegard detonates the drum kit again and again. After it seems as if the music cannot take it anymore, it fades, then reverses; a voice laughs, and the guitar appears for a moment of brief respite as a syncopated wah-wah beat for flutes and electronic effects to dance around. And then as quickly as it arrived, the band returns for one last trip atop the original crashing, shattering beat. The guitar wails and screams, shattering through the ceiling above, escaping into the emptiness beyond. By the time the drums finally stop, the guitar has degraded into unrestrained rumbling feedback. Its last echos melt away until only glimmers of it are left, like the fading stars now visible in the distance.