Posts Tagged ‘david bentley’

Solblomma firar in sommaren med Eugen!

Tuesday, June 10th, 2025

How to sum it up? The best I can offer is Pink Floyd meets Judy Garland, somewhere over a rainbow.

Solblomma returns with another track from her album, ‘Alla var där’ (‘Everyone was there’) which will be released on 15th August.

She says it is the track she loves the most and it is called ‘Eugen’.

Every track on the album refers to a different character and each has their own story to tell.

Some of them have regular names such as Kjell, Eugen, Jasmine, Solvej, and Mats while others carry a more familiar moniker, like Brigitte Bardot and Don Quijote.

Trying to figure out the meaning of a Solblomma song is like challenging Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In fact I’m surprised Einstein isn’t one of the characters, he would have blended in perfectly.

Solblomma also describes it as “very mainstream”, which means she’s stepping well outside her comfort zone, which is anything but.

Here is a sample snippet of the lyrics:

“It’s been a long time/the wine fell from the clouds

You turned on the music/and asked me to come in”

Hm.

And then, later, some lines that have significance for me in an obscure way.

“It’s been a long time/we rode our bikes on the highway

and swam in the bay/where’s the blue scarf?”

The cognoscenti will know that Oldham Athletic, a founder member of the Premier League in 1992 and who play in blue, was promoted back into the Football League’s fourth tier last Sunday after too long away from it and 35 years since they last won a promotion.

And you see that’s what I’ve said before about Solblomma; she doesn’t write nonsense lyrics any more than Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) or Voltaire (Candide) or Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) or Alexei Sayle (Barcelona Plates) wrote nonsense prose.

She writes stuff that you can easily fit to your psyche, your history and your view of the world.

But then the final lines,

“I have pigs in my stomach/they moved in/one morning in July

That’s when/they came”

do test me, I admit! Were they in blankets?

Musically, having deserted her trademark electronic sound last time she’s very much back there on this occasion with a constant repeating riff (this time a synthesised bass note gnawing its way into your subconscious), following an intro that sounds as if it is played on a toy single octave piano and a tune that might accompany a merry-go-round funfair ride.

How to sum it up? The best I can offer is Pink Floyd meets Judy Garland, somewhere over a rainbow.

It isn’t psychy but it isn’t that far off it and could easily gravitate that way.

There are many avenues left for her to navigate yet.

/David Bentley

Solblomma (Sweden) – Eugen (single/future album track)

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The Girl Under The New Moon

Sunday, March 4th, 2018

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more oddball, quirky character in the music business than Stockholm-based SoLBloMMa (Sunflower in English, and her real name).  The philosophy graduate is a multi-tasker; she’s also a puppet master, a clown, a designer of online IQ games and a railway geek to rival Pete Waterman. Vocally it’s possible to detect something of Cyndi Lauper, Clare Grogan (Altered Images), Polly Scattergood and even a stoned Björk, as one critic dubbed her.

In a long career she’s been signed to EMI (she now has her own label), had chart success under a different name but has also busked her way around Europe, scored a Portuguese TV series, worked with leading jazz pianists and saxophonists and dabbled in everything from trip hop to death metal, gaining a cult following along the way. Her direction momentarily is increasingly electronic. Her public persona is a brave one to wear in a country where overt individuality frequently encourages a condescending response.

She writes quite thoughtful songs, sometimes with a slant on unrequited love but she’ll tackle any subject. This latest single is one of the few she’s recorded in her native language – most are in English – and a well known folk song there.

The next one – ‘Charles de Gaulle’, scheduled for release on 30th March, is completely different as she reprises the role of Tom Hanks in ‘The Terminal’. In typical SoLBloMMa style the supporting video was filmed not at the Paris airport but at Stockholm Arlanda and Prague airports.

By David Bentley

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New Music: Solblomma – She Said Nothing

Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

Off all the fascinating artists I met at Gefle Gas, the festival I reviewed a few weeks back, SoLBloMMa (her stylisation) (or ‘Sunflower’ in English, it’s her name) stuck in my mind at least partly because she’s unique, a free artistic spirit. So I’ve researched her and have been on the lookout for anything new from her. While she has some ‘elements’ of other performers in her persona I have never seen or heard anyone else with whom she can directly be compared. She’s about as far removed from generic pop as you can get, and I’m all for it.

She’s multi-skilled, making her own videos to promote her electronic alt-pop work (many of them involve the ‘faceover’ you see here). Having once been signed to EMI she now runs her own label (Blomkraft) and even multi-tasks as a puppet master and as a clown (not a creepy one I might add, more as a genuine children’s entertainer). She designs online IQ games and she even rivals Pete Waterman as a railway geek; you can’t get quirkier than that.

Vocally, while I again stress her uniqueness, you can identify at least bits of Cyndi Lauper, Clare Grogan (Altered Images), and Polly Scattergood in her voice, while visually she often has the look of (a much gentler) Alex from A Clockwork Orange. She’s a self-creation of contradictions.

While I’m uneasy about using other peoples’ reviews, this truncated analysis from Electronic Magazine is priceless:

“Think Depeche Mode booted out the back of a Transit van on a cold, dark winter’s night, think Lykke Li taken by the dark side, think Kylie with Winehouse’s problems, think Björk dating Goldie… then we begin to see something remotely resembling Solblomma. With eyes you could stand teacups on, she’s got something of the Cheryl Cole about her… only with a Katie Price makeover… at night… with doll’s clothes.

I rest my case.

The video here for She Said Nothing was inspired by a recent business trip to the western USA which took in Las Vegas, the sort of place she’d be very much at home in, as a philosophy graduate, with its sharp contrasts between rich and poor, big business and ‘the ordinary people’, professional entertainers and street bums, cops and bad guys (think the original CSI) and, ultimately, winners and losers.

While the song is set in a wintry Amsterdam, it could equally play out in loser’s Sin City as her departing lover struggles to find the words to explain how he’s lost his love for her. (Probably at the tables, along with his credit). As Win Butler sings, when love is gone, where does it go?

The only problem I have is the lyrics, or at least some of them. It has some great lines, such as “you and me in the land of Shakespeare, breathing love in my ear; our trip, my dear, has just begun” and “I’ve lost my love, he said/hmmm, she said nothing/a bottle of stone crashed her heart”. But other stanzas leave me floundering.  Most of the Scandinavian/Nordic world speaks better English than we does but whether it’s Iceland, Norway or Sweden I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said in these pages that something doesn’t make sense; that the meaning has been ‘lost in translation’. Perhaps it’s time for someone to devise a Scandinavian-English songbook dictionary.

Solblomma Hedin has taken on several different personas over the years. She’s busked her way around Europe, dabbled in Death Metal with one of many bands, The Strawberry Army, had chart success with the songs Girl at the Station and Sandman, worked with leading jazz pianists and saxophonists, scored a Portuguese TV series, and her first album (1997) was described as ‘epic experimental trip hop”, in which she portrayed a dozen different characters herself, prompting one critic to liken her to a stoned Björk. Oh, and she’s also adept at writing and adapting traditional Swedish folk songs.

Until a few years ago she wrote and performed as ‘KiN’ (‘Sun’ in the Mayan language), releasing two albums and four singles with a similar style but latterly as Solblomma she’s been going in two directions, one of them even more deeply into a sort of fantasy world with her current band The Sheep Army (which I’m not completely convinced by, as I said in the festival review). The other direction, under new management guidance with Comedia, is deeper into the electronic world where there are more possibilities for someone of her creative mindset, as this song and video suggest, and which at least falls within a ‘traditional’ framework.

It’s a necessary move in my opinion. The Nordic countries in general and Sweden, in particular, are home to The Law of Jante, which is too complex to go into detail about here, but which effectively describes a condescending attitude towards individuality and success; a mentality that de-emphasises individual effort and places all weight on the collective, while discouraging those who stand out as achievers. If you watch ‘The Bridge’ you can see it in the character of Saga Norén.

For that reason alone perhaps the time is right for Solblomma to seek her fortune elsewhere, where such laws have no reach. Not so much Leaving Las Vegas as arriving there.

 

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