Posted on June 4, 2009 - by Jamie Russell

The unknown colours of a 90s revival…

“Unknown Colors“, the debut album from Swedish newcomers Sad Day For Puppets, is a nostalgic skinny dip into teen-hood, circa 1990. A turn-of-the-decade affair, whipped up in an echoey swarm of distortion and indubitably girlish couplets, it’s built to reinvigorate a breed of shoegaze pop we might otherwise forget. And the secret ingredient? A palpable knack for melody – the kind, I’m led to believe, that more or less grows on trees in Sweden (or, perhaps, comes in easy-to-assemble flat packs).

The formula is plain and simple – slow-driving beats, slow-crashing chords, lustrous guitar hooks and verse torn straight from a teenybopper’s secret diary. Whether it’s the lackadaisical charm of ‘Blue Skies’, the kitsch 12-bar beach-rock of ‘Cherry Blossom’, or the playful, extemporary “Lay Your Burden On Me” – “Unknown Colours” is a treasure-chest of feel-good anthems. Granted, you’ve got to be willing to suspend your disbelief – ‘”Everything that’s good and true / could never be as beautiful as you’”- but once you’re happy to swallow the sentiment whole, you’ve pretty much got it figured. All that’s left is to float adrift amid its earnest contours.

I do wonder if ‘acoustic’ one-offs like “When the Morning Comes” have climbed a little too far up the decade that music forgot. These tracks might be saved if they were dropped back into the primordial soup of the album’s steady beats and electric guitars – but then it would have proved quite a journey to stretch the full 13 tracks. All in all, it’s hard to see whether Unknown Colors has much of an overarching narrative (suggestions please…). It seems to me that the sound is the biggest part of the story – and it is big enough to hold it steady – but, that said, perhaps a standard 10-piece would have made the grade a little better?

So, all those happy campers trembling in the wake of a 90s revival, can rest their minds a moment. Sad Day For Puppets may be digging up some deeply buried relics from the not so distant past, but here it’s a welcome resurrection – a sweet tasting, slow motion mist of nostalgia cloaking a tuneful soundscape . We can only cross our fingers as to the cascading tsunami (otherwise known as a champagne supernova) that threatens our respite. Yep, that’s right, the nascent threat of a fully-fledged Brit-Pop revival….

Sad Day For Puppets – “Cherry Blossom”

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