Record Review: The Tough Alliance - The New School

via Ragged Words
Release Date: 20 Jul 2009
Record Label: Service
In Three Words: I Love Sweden
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

No one makes popular electronic music like they do in Sweden. It began with the Knife’s Deep Cuts back in 2004 (‘Heartbeats’ was song of the year for many, thanks in part to Jose Gonzalez’s cover version) and since then it’s been all Jens Lekman, Studio and The Tough Alliance, with ambient melancholics JJ recently becoming the new indie blogspot darlings. And that’s without even mentioning Air France or the Knife slice-off Fever Ray. You can’t help but feel that all the praise is well-deserved though, apart from the Knife, few of these artists have really been appreciated anywhere other than the handful of hegemonic leftist-indie websites. And that’s strange only because this is pop music to a beat, with the sunshine and witty sense of self reminiscent of the Beach Boys.

For the Tough Alliance, it’s a blend of English-as-second-language vocals, a well-reared sampling methodology, indigestible melodies that suck like leeches at your frontal lobes, and an imperious style of production as good as any cash-rich studio dope. These Swedes are bedroom musicians of the highest calibre. Among them, The Tough Alliance are lodged in the leftfield, and they don’t reveal much. In an interview with Pitchfork, the duo responded to a question about the nature of the band: ‘It is what it is, man… People seem to have an unhealthy need for simple, shallow, and irrelevant information and we feel it would oppose the essence of The Tough Alliance to encourage this destructive behaviour. We want the focus to be on the expression of the unity of TTA, not on our personas.’

If 2007’s A New Chance is a swift and perfectly-formed piece, The New School – the band’s debut originally released two year earlier - is something different. It’s five songs larger and twenty-minutes longer whilst being altogether more grounded. TTA have since built songs from the soil upward, but here the Swedes are compiling tunes brick by digital brick. And, for a while, The New School might not be what latter TTA fans had hoped for or expect if coming to for the first time. Whereas A New Chance grabs you by the ankle and flings you around the room, The New School requires a little more patience. At fifty-minutes it might be a too long for those expecting instant joys. Beyond the record’s underbelly of midget kicks and thudding CPU thrum-toms, there lies a contemplative edge. The sampling of the Kopite refrain ‘You’ll never walk alone,’ is probably an ode to TTA’s hometown football club (LOL), but for this bitter Evertonian reviewer it’s a concession to commitment.

The New School in itself sounds like a call to arms, with ‘Koka Kola Veins’ – the standout track here – musing on those in a sugary, cola stupor: “We got koka kola veins/we don’t know our names/blah blah blah”. It’s not necessarily a criticism but a confession. For TTA at least, it’s time to stop fucking around.