Imagine Sonic Youth brought up on Sesame Street rather than the weary rasp of Patti Smith and the smoggy haze of New York City. Now envisage Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon born of Sweden disposition (or Gothenburg to be precise) and you’d be about half way to placing
Love Is All. To be filed alongside compatriots Those Dancing Days, I’m From Barcelona, The Concretes and the now tragically defunct Hemstad, they’re irrepressibly Scandinavian with a strand of bubbly lo-fi spurting out of every pore like kaleidoscopic party streamers, as gangly guitar lines scratch their way into Josephine Olausson’s bratty caterwauls like Wolverine carving hearts into oak trunks. As Bigger Bolder rolls into action like a fuzzy boulder constructed of marshmallow rollicking down mounds of powder snow, Love Is All seem to have shot an injection of Be Your Own Pet’s unruly apathy into proceedings, as saxophones bound about inside of a retro ramshackle Velvet Underground composition. Whilst their aforementioned contemporaries have either been drowned out by the ceaseless stream of music that emerges from the internet like unmanned fire hydrants flooding the streets of Manhattan, or run out of creative oxygen entirely, Love Is All have flown haphazardly close to the winds of demise having recently found themselves in the perilous marshlands of the unsigned. Two Thousand And Ten Injuries, released by Illinois' Polyvinyl label, showcases the Swedish quintet sounding more boisterous than ever, with lyrics of slipping over in showers, staying up “three nights straight” and Olausson squealing “I didn’t expect you to be here, now I don’t know what to say. I’m less than thrilled you're ok” on Less Than Thrilled. Flittering effortlessly, and somewhat bemusedly through soothing guitar clunks (A Side In A Bed), muffled ratchet clanks over symphonic synths (Take Your Time) and scrappy euphoria (Early Warnings) Love Is All may not be entirely decided on who they actually are musically, or in which direction they’re headed. That said, Two Thousand And Ten Injuries is a rather delectable listen, with very little aural pain inflicted throughout. Reverting to the sunnier flip-side of the Swedish musical spectrum, away from the unsettling darkness cast mystically by the Dreijer Anderssons, Love Is All return just in time to soundtrack some much-needed daylight-saving.
