Dungen Tio Bitar

I liked the second Dungen album, Ta Det Lugnt, and not just because the title had a word with three consecutive consonants (the album Mwng and the song Swlabr presaging great things). To me, it sounded like an acid-induced dream in which Jimi Hendrix, now Swedish, attempted to take over The Association by force. Mastermind Gustav Estjes (stj!) pulled off this rather implausible scenario fairly well I thought, at least at the time. Now, I almost never listen to the album, reaching for the next button every time the songs come up on rotation. Why? Who knows? It has its moments, but now seems more like a novelty than the major artistic statement about the endurance of psychedelic rock it was generally hailed as. Or it sounded like a novelty until Tio Bitar came out, following the same template but with less success.

Estjes is still a killer guitar player and the drums still sound like they were yanked directly from Axis: Bold As Love, but my guess is, and I'm not basing this on any knowledge whatsoever, that maybe this all sounds a little more familiar and inviting to Swedish ears than to these crass American ones. I'm having trouble sinking my teeth into a lot of this and I'm not sure it's my fault. I get some of it; Du Ska Inte Tro Att Det Sig, which must be the name of a Flaming Lips song in Swedish, is a cool enough blend of the strange and appealing for me to dig, and similarly the instrumental En Gang I Ar Kom Det En Tar sounds good enough to have been included on Pink Floyd at Pompeii. Elsewhere I get off on the innocuous sound but I have to say it doesn't really move me. I may be an isolated, xenophobic philistine, but at least I'm honest.

The album promises great things by starting off quoting Jimi's Star Spangled Banner, and certainly few guitarists playing today evoke the kind of mad intensity on display here, but like the Comets on Fire, the whole package rarely comes off as good as you think it should, especially with the benefit of hindsight. As a dude who came of age in the worst possible era in rock history, the god awful 80's, and who always felt like he missed the boat by being born in the Summer of Love rather than making babies in it, I want to like this a lot more than I do.