Three years later, Estjes, has returned with another masterpiece, Tio Bitar, Swedish for “Ten Pieces.” Still singing in Swedish, Estjes’s lyrics are unintelligible to everyone but your average Peter, Bjorn, and Jens. Fox, capable of playing Marty McFly, Marty McFly Jr., and Marlene McFly, all at the same time. Or to put it in more cinematic terms, Estjes was his own Michael J. He was the spitting image of Robert Plant, weaned on a steady diet of Pink Floyd and Madvillain, a multi-instrumentalist capable of playing every instrument on wax, from fairytale flute solos to boom-bap drums, from hammer of Thor electric guitar riffs to gentle Laurel Canyon tambourines. With critics wracking their brains for synonyms for “angular,” 24-year-old Swede Gustav Estjes walked in the door. It was the sort of record I always wanted to listen to, renovating ’60s acid rock for the millennium, a refreshing anachronism at a time when “indie” was torn asunder by the burning question of whether it was better to emulate Wire or Joy Division. Twenty-plus years later, that’s how I felt about Dungen’s last record, 2004’s brilliant Ta Det Lungt. But back in those black and white and fluorescent days when VHS rental shops and frozen yogurt were all the rage, I was obsessed with the Back to the Future series, obsessed to the point where every time I headed to Movies N’ More, they were the only films my grammar-school self wanted to rent. The ’80s seem almost archaic in the instant-orgasm Internet age, where everyone has a Netflix account to watch Bulgarian independent DVDs and iPods with enough horse-power to feed a Nepalese family of four for four years.
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