The Soundtrack of our Lives
"Behind The Music"
(Telegram/Hidden Agenda)

Sweden's Soundtrack Of Our Lives emerged from the wreckage that was late-Eighties/early-Nineties rock monsters Union Carbide Productions, who explored the possibilities of where The Stooges might have gone after "Funhouse" had Iggy stayed away from heroin and just stuck to acid and speed. The starting point for SOOL was more along the lines of supposing what Love's "Gesthemane" (the album that was supposed to appear between "Forever Changes" and "Four Sail") could have sounded like, and their debut "Welcome To The Infant Freebase" found that peculiar middle ground between baroque psychedelia and crunching late-Sixties style hard rock. "Behind The Music", their third album (and their first without guitarist and co-founder Bjorn Olsson), sonically finds them squarely in The Pretty Things' "Parachute" territory, but with Ebbot Lundberg's surreal lyrics (like "Right from the start I only wanted to please you/I didn't mean to kill you") and some oddball musical touches giving SOOL its own distinctive identity. The British press has been going nuts for them like they never did (but should have!) for UCP, and when you hear how effortlessly SOOL can go from a stomper like "21st Century Rip Off" to the slo-mo psych of "Tonight" to the acoustic riffing of "Keep The Line Movin'", it's easy to see why. Think of Soundtrack Of Our Lives as what classic rock would sound like if it really was as good as radio programmers and ad agencies want you to believe it is.

-Mike B.