LOOSEGOATS - Her, The City Et Al (Sealed) (LP)

The Loosegoats serve up inconspicuous yet moving folk tunes that turn night into day. Yes, the old clich?. In Scandinavia the nights are especially long, the winter anyway, and how could you defy cold and gloom any other way than with music? Some lock themselves up in the rehearsal room, switch on the amplifiers and lower the electric to the lower edge of their thighs. The others move into the quiet chamber, switch on the dimmed lamp and lower their heads to half mast. To each his own. The Loosegoats seem to wear their half-long hair for hiding rather than shaking. After presenting themselves as a Swedish Pavement variant on their debut four years ago, they grazed the meadows of folk and country for their third longplayer "Her, The City Et Al" and digested it into a work with nothing to complain about. With a kind of concept album about a young lady who moves from the country to the city, they join Wilco and the Jayhawks on the one hand and pay tribute to old master Neil Young on the other. In jewels like the programmatic "Days Of Black (Nights Are Light)" the Loosegoats tell of "hours of waiting for moments of truth" and conjure up hope wherever darkness was seen before.