Dina Ögon - Oas

Dina Ögon - Oas

A1 - Bakom Glaset
A2 - Mormor
A3 - Berget
A4 - Vi Smälter
A5 - År
B1 - Oas
B2 - Mellan Slagen
B3 - Docka
B4 - Docka Kväll
B5 - Pumpan

Dina Ögon is like a bumblebee – big and fluffy and it should be impossible for it to fly, but it does it anyway – quite simply as well. Anna Ahnlund, Christopher Cantillo, Daniel Ögren and Love Örsan have had forty fingers involved in an unnumerable amount of Swedish rock, jazz, soul and pop projects, recordings and tours and all kinds of hush hush. Between themselves they’ve played in different constellations and played back up for each other, assisted even more in one form or another for more than a decade. But now they’ve formed a more remarkable quartet than what transpired from any of all the shenanigans they’ve previously been involved with.
Oas kicks off with the optimistic sounds of Bakom glaset to rush forth between the soundscapes of pop from both sides of the Atlantic in the sixties. Not least on the summery Berget or the low key, soft rock of Docka. When the latter is followed up with Docka ikväll – that in other circumstances would be categorized as a dub remix – it becomes adventurous and the reinvent what they just assembled in a new form. 
Whoever had the laborious duty of choosing singles from this album must have had a tough task; the biggest weakness is that this is solidly good to the point of making it absurdly hard to name what the obvious standout tune is. Mormor is a sonic Rorschach test, one moment it sounds joyful, the next it’s melancholic bordering the sad. But the title track Oas might be the boss cut here and the lyrics about love and its complexity, about the everyday that follows infatuation, might have the lines that will linger in memory and rule the airwaves. With a tone and a text wholly cognate with the greats of seventies pop.
It’s not conventional wisdom to mix every delicacy you like when cooking, but Dina Ögon seem to have gotten away with it and their time spent in the studio seems to have been dedicated to a rebuttal of that wisdom. Folk rock, soul, bossanova, jazz and hip hop beats get on well together in this space and seem to infect each other and the listeners. 
The self-titled debut was like a tilted “Whodunnit” detective story; rather than “who has done it?” you ask yourself “how did they do it?”. On the sophomore effort it feels as if the band is even more playful, perhaps because they’ve simply found their form, but that never leads to an overdose of comfortability because the tracks go off in so many different directions. Just when you figure you’ve got the name of a possible original source of inspiration on your tongue the song suckerpunches you and charges on towards futurist sounds of the past. As a whole, Oas takes the form of a cinematic carpet, one moment it’s as if a soul big band orchestra got to compose the soundtrack to an unreleased blockbuster movie recorded in the sixties, the next moment it’s a message in a bottle in the shape of pop marinated in slick r’n’b and hip hop.

PGMLLP163
180g vinyl