Melpo Mene’s “Holes”

This band (the name is a ref­er­ence to Greek myth) is pri­mar­i­ly Swedish singer/songwriter/lead gui­tarist Erik Mat­ti­as­son. Mat­ti­as­son works out his own per­son­al ago­nies. He had a rough child­hood in Kiruna, a small city in Swe­den’s north­ern­most boonies. He suf­fers from schiz­o­phre­nia. The title cut, with its eerie, whis­pered lyrics about holes in his head, explores this mal­a­dy from an insid­er’s view. The musi­cian­ship is fine, my only qualm is that all the songs have the same tone, so per­haps they are more effec­tive when heard one at a time. There’s a new album out, Bring the Lions In, which I haven’t been able to get a hold of. As with most Swedish rock, it’s sung in Eng­lish. Does­n’t any­body record songs in Swedish? It’s nice to be acces­si­ble to the world mar­ket, but sure­ly there’s some­thing lost when an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage so thor­ough­ly dom­i­nates a coun­try’s music scene.

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