Whale - All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones

All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones is a great name for an album, if somewhat ungrammatical. I thought for a very long time it was the name of the band, which would be even better. It did set me some mistaken expectations. With a name that long I figured it was probably an indie band in the vein of …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. It’s not the name though so I excuse them for not living up to my expectations, though the world would be better with more …Trail Of Dead. This confusion also explains why a band named Whale is being reviewed at the beginning of the alphabet, although admittedly my adherence to the strict ABCs has been somewhat scattershot as a result of the move.

What Wale is, is as interesting as a …Trail Of Dead clone that does not exist. They are a Swedish pop band in the alternative genre that had some success in the 90s. “Disco Dance…”  was one of their successful albums, which shows what I know about the European pop charts. Musically it is not what you would expect from Swedish Pop. Although in our post-Hives era this assumption may be incorrect, I think most people associate all Scandinavian countries with Death Metal, and Sweden in particular with overly cheerful ABBA clones, such as Ace of Base. Though there is somehow a black dude who will insert raps, the rest of the band sounds like Massive Attack. They are more energetic, and they have a kind of a Grime edge, but they have the same ethereal vocals and melodies floating over subtly complex rhythms that occasionally swell to a high energy foreground. They do depart from this formula with some regularity, and the results are often spectacular. For example, the Pixiesesque “Puma Gym,” and the dance pop “Deliver the Juice” which in many ways predicted a lot of the tools in the Gorillaz musical handbook. Overall the biggest difference between Whale and Massive Attack is much better rapping. I say this without any malice towards Massive Attack, but Whale’s rapper is pretty great. It’s a shame they only trot him out on one or two songs. Whale’s lyrics are also quite good, though Massive Attacks may have a bit more of a biting edge.

There are some weird things here. Firstly, I don’t know how many black rappers there are in Sweden, but they must all be in pop bands. There must be a fucking industry where the three black guys in Sweden cycle between bands, with a running pool on whether anyone will notice they are different between sets. This is not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is that this is a Swedish Pop group that sings in EXTREMELY articulate English, sounds like a British pop group, had most of their success on the continent, and shows some solid American influence. There are bigger examples out there but this is globalization gone batshit crazy. It must be really weird to be a Swedish teenager, turn on the radio, and hear your countrymen and women in bands that sing in a foreign language. And a language that is native to none of your neighboring countries, but which has become a lingua franca for the pop scenes of all of them. I wonder if this is why they made the title slightly off grammatically, because all their songs are spot on.

So bottom line, if you hate Massive Attack, you may not have much to like about this band. If you do like Massive Attack, this is an album that definitely will reward your patience. The more you listen to it the more they deviate from the formula, play with it, and make it their own. One really gets the feeling that they are pushing the boundaries of what they can do as a band, which may explain why this was their last album. Bottom line, these guys are more than a Massive Attack clone, though it’s kind of impossible to discuss them without the reference.