Fun Fun Fun till your daddy takes this album away, good stuff to groove to
Let's hope this month never ends! Last Days of April are really cool and Might As Well Live is really good. The Swedish band blend rock and punk with a great ear for great pop and have produced an album which is fun all the way through. They take the happy zeitgeists of punk-pop and 'emo' and produce music in that form as if they invented it, and they certainly played their part in its origination, but this new album is so succinct and tightly focused it's worthy of some serious smiles.
Beginning with a soft yet weighty tune which goes by the ubiquitous title of 'Lost and Found' you're drawn into their world then they bring out power-popper 'Great White's Jaws' which is as good as the music the Foo Fighters were producing at the time of 'There Is Nothing Left To Lose' and better than anything they've produced since. It's really enjoyable craic, big driving chords which sing of a certain heartfelt meaning, stressed with tonal strength.
In 'Hanging High' a jiggy 'doo-bee-doo-bee' riffs rips in, reminding us of those early Pulp licks that were fun and fabulously danceable, in the likes of 'Do You Remember The First Time' and 'Babies'. Then 'Get Out While You Can' starts with a slight reminiscence of Bell X1's 'Bigger Than Me' and moves quickly into a Rilo Kiley-like showstopper, it sweeps and stretches across cool and innovative ideas, providing a good middle-of-an-album song that's coursing with freshness, yet strong in its generic tendencies, there's splashes of Lazlo Bane in there, the sound moves throughout from that even to Sigur Ros-ishness.
This whole album's varied and wide-ranging in its styles certainly, yet there's such a closely-tied musical quality to each song, once you know it you know it's Last Days of April, there's great voice, great guitar-work and great percussion, it works very well and although there's the slightest of dips in the album as it approaches its end, found mostly in the form of the almost Smiths-esque 'Come On Over', Might As Well Live is a very worthy effort, it delivers punch, panache and painstaking enjoyablity, it's certainly a fun one, fantastic innocuous music which, if you decide to take notice of it, you'll see is well put together, and produced excellently, either way you'll get it stuck in your head.