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I’m from Barcelona is a 29-piece band from Jönköping, Sweden. With Let Me Introduce My Friends, the band’s debut, they’ve crafted an impressively restrained collection of indie-pop songs, considering the girth of the group; the problem is that the 11-song album is exactly 10/11ths forgettable.
Despite the size of the band, I’m from Barcelona’s focal point is songwriter and singer Emanuel Lundgren. According to the band’s website, Lundgren was spurred into writing “explosive happy pop songs” after having fallen in love with Frida Öhnell, who now plays maracas with the band.
After Lundgren rounded up 28 friends, the newly-formed band recorded a four-song EP entitled Don’t Give up on Your Dreams, Buddy!, which was subsequently released on EMI Sweden. It’s at this point that the “popularity with bloggers” narrative kicks into effect, landing the band a spot in Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival and encouraging the ensemble to record a full-length.
The underwhelming end result belies this new mode of musical production. None of the album’s songs are offensively dashed-off, but all have the feeling of a band that’s unwilling or uncomfortable moving beyond its own formal constraints. “We’re from Barcelona” is undoubtedly the band’s strongest song, with a generous and chirpy chorus that never quite wears out its welcome. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for “Treehouse,” which, while still one of the album’s stronger tracks, disastrously overestimates the cleverness of its “return to childhood through love” conceit.
The album’s greatest shortcoming, however, is in its overeagerness to reach catharsis. “Ola Kala” opens with a flimsy little shuffle that details common themes of post-college anxiety before launching into a swoon that offers up too-easy solutions to the musical and lyrical questions posed in the verse.
It’s this internal disjuncture that makes listening to the album a frequently enervating endeavor. The band's members contribute no small amount of creative, tasteful instrumentation; never do the songs feel overwrought or burdened by too much ambition. Unlike similarly-minded bands like Architecture in Helsinki and Broken Social Scene, they have the kind of focus that make it difficult to refer to them as a collective. Every musical intervention is so purposeful as to make the nominally experimental aspects of the aforementioned bands seem fairly outlandish and indulgent by comparison.
By this point, it can safely be said that any blog success story already contains and normalizes its own backlash. Let Me Introduce My Friends is an album produced under the pressure of hype, with all of the pleasures and shortcomings that entails. By Brandon Bussolini
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Always Spring