| Be that as it may, though, I feel like if I tried to break down a Stockholm Monsters song for you, it’d be like dissecting my wife. Alma Mater, whose reissue features nine rarities and b-sides (for me this is like saying “hey, we found the Ark of the Covenant”), features everything that made the Stockholm Monsters great: the strange, strangled-then-thinly-soaring vocals of Tony France, the unspeakably gorgeous bass guitar, the vaguely skiffle rhythms, the echoing background noises that drift threateningly in and out -- the overall tension of it, and the way that the singer seems to think that all this tension will certainly come to nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing in the end -- and the lyrics, which are simplicity itself (“They say tomorrow’s ended/we’ve found a place to stay/where moments last forever/and never go away”) but which, over time, unburden themselves of a magnificently oppressive sadness. It is almost intolerably great. Everyone in the world should own at least one copy. Most people would do well to own two. |