The Northern country rockers in Hellsingland Underground are back with their fourth album and, as expected, they exceed expectations. Already when I heard the rough initial recordings of eight of the songs from Hellsingland Underground’s studio sessions for the first time back in August, I knew that Charlie Granberg and his merry Hellsingland brothers were onto something great. When I a few months later got the final mix of the album in my inbox, I knew that this new album has the potential of taking Hellsingland Underground above ground and onto the world’s major stages. I have always loved Hellsingland Underground’s laid-back rock – very influenced by American Southern rock and British blues rock but at the same time full of Nordic melancholy. The best way to describe this is if Glenn Hughes would never have joined Deep Purple and instead kept going with the fantastic Trapeze and relocated the band to a goat farm next to the Ljusnan river in Ljusdal, Hellsingland in central Sweden. This is no nonsense, simple but beautiful music born out of a bunch of musician’s love for creating and playing music that they like. The new album, “Understanding Gravity” (out on Wild Kingdom Records on 1st April), opens with the upbeat rocker “Earth’s Gonna Shake” and we’re off to a great start. “Dizzy Jonson & The Rovers” is about Granberg’s early days as a musician, looking up to some older boys who “looked like the best band in the world”. In the 80s, before I gave in to the fact that I wasn’t going to be a rock star, I shared a couple of rehearsal spaces with Granberg, who lived in the same neighbourhood as me in Ljusdal, Hellsingland. Back then Granberg was a drummer in a heavy metal band and I was trying to be a punk rocker and heavy metal bassist at the same time (with very limited success). Granberg’s heavy metal band, Hexagon, never made it. But once Granberg, after many years in Stockholm – where he worked as an illustrator and designer for bands such as Electric Boys, Backyard Babies, Marduk, Dissection and The Cardigans – returned to Ljusdal and switched to singing, he was onto something different and much better. Already on their self-titled debut album in 2008, Hellsingland Underground delivered great stuff (including the by now classic song “Northern Country Boy”) and they have never looked back
