Following their second album, Sweden's Shout Out Louds took a break and spent six months apart to regroup. While assorted members went to LA or stayed in Stockholm, singer/songwriter Adam Olenius headed to Melbourne, where he wrote a bunch of new tracks using a synth, an acoustic guitar and a laptop. After some back and forth exchanges with his bandmates in far-flung corners of the globe, Work was born.
While it was written in Australia, this latest long-player was recorded in Seattle with a non-Swede (Phil Ek – The Shins, Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses) at the production helm for the first time. The most noticeable difference here is that there is a lot less going on than in their previous two recordings. It still has the catchy indie-pop sound that fans of the band will be familiar with, but there was a deliberate effort this time to leave plenty of open spaces, to scale back the percussion and the strings and to allow the songs space to breathe. In spite of this, Shout Out Louds still sound a little indistinguishable. At times they come across like Phoenix being fronted by a Scandinavian Robert Smith. Of course, there are far worse things to sound like than that, and, overall, this is a pleasing enough collection of perky pop songs and lower tempo numbers.
Solid as it is though, Work still doesn't catapult Shout Out Louds to the level of greatness that the Swedes have been agonisingly close to for so long and, therefore, they seem destined to remain the kind of band that you like rather than love.
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